"Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act" Could Pass Over Veto This Week

Opponents say there are no applicable cases; proponents disagree

By Tristan Dufresne 6/4/19 6:13PM

RALEIGH — A contentious piece of abortion legislation vetoed by Governor Roy Cooper on April 18 has been scheduled for an override vote in the state house on June 5, as Republican state lawmakers rally support and search for Democrats willing to break party ranks.



The proposed bill, the "Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act," made it through the North Carolina General Assembly with a Senate vote of 28–19 on April 15 and a House vote of 65-46 the following day.

To override the governor's veto, a three-fifths majority vote in each chamber is required.

The state Senate voted 20–30 to override it on April 30. Senate Member Don Davis, who represents Greene and Pitt counties, was the only Democrat to vote yes.

First introduced to the NCGA on March 26, the bill's contents lay out the legal status of an infant born alive after a failed abortion attempt.

Cooper and his staff released a statement explaining why he rejected the bill, claiming that state and federal law already offers protection to newborns, rendering the "Born Alive" bill redundant.

"This needless legislation would criminalize doctors and other healthcare providers for a practice that simply does not exist," Cooper said.

The act would introduce new penalties, both civil and criminal, for causing or not trying to prevent the death of a newborn. Penalties include a fine of up to $250,000 and Class D felony charges, which could be levelled at nurses and physicians who fail to "exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child…whether the expulsion or extraction [of the child] occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion."

The bill explicitly states that only healthcare providers can be held liable and that "the mother...may not be prosecuted" under this act.

Under the bill, the life of the newborn would be positively established by "a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles."

Heartbeat is said to begin in a fetus at around six to eight weeks of pregnancy, although research from the University of Leeds, published this year by the Royal Society in its academic journal, has indicated that although heartbeat-like sounds in a fetus may be detected as early as the 22nd day of a pregnancy, human heart cells start to organize much later, toward 20 weeks of gestation.

This year, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Ohio have outlawed abortion after heartbeat detection, in defiance of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which made first-trimester abortions legal in all cases and second-trimester abortions able to be limited only by health regulations.

Existing North Carolina law allows abortions only before 20 weeks of pregnancy and allows them after that point only for medical emergencies.

While the "Born Alive" bill requires healthcare providers to report more information on abortion in addition to outlining stiff sanctions for violations, its language does not actually add restrictions to the practice.

One key sponsor of the bill, Joyce Krawiec, a Republican Senate member who represents Davie County and part of Forsyth County, answered this criticism in a speech she gave on the Senate floor, saying, "No, we do not have laws in place protecting babies who are born alive as the result of an abortion."

The Equal Protection and Due Process clauses in the United States Constitution, the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and state homicide laws all criminalize killing a newborn.

Professor Neil Seigel of Duke Law School told the Sundial, "In short, this bill is about trying to persuade more people to oppose abortion; it's not about preventing infanticide, which is already a crime and has been for a very long time."

A letter supporting Cooper's veto from the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina emphasized that to "interfere with the patient-provider relationship, [will] target healthcare providers and mislead the public about safe, legal abortion care."

Reproductive rights advocates worry that the law is too vague on the evidentiary requirements of what would constitute noncompliance. Lindsay Robinson, N.C. director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said in a press statement, "We know the real reason these claims are being pushed, to stigmatize reproductive health care and manufacture outrage over something that isn't happening to distract from what actually is…. These politicians' motives have long been clear — to ban safe abortion altogether."

Grace Howard is the codirector of Rutgers University's Informed Consent Project, a research team that evaluates the medical accuracy of reading material provided by states to people seeking abortions, for those states that require "informed consent" before an abortion. Howard told the Sundial, "What this law is doing is singling out a particular kind of doctor who is already highly stigmatized, and it's saying, 'Look, these are the kind of people who would just let a baby die,' which is a total falsehood."

As for the repercussion, she says, "I think potentially [the bill] could have a chilling effect."

More controversy has surrounded the bill relating to its votes' schedule. In a series of controversial moves, House Speaker Tim Moore has postponed the override vote on 10 occasions since the end of April, possibly in an attempt to gain the support of sympathetic Democrats, or in hope of there being few enough legislators present voting in opposition for Republicans to pass the bill over Cooper's veto.

General Assembly members have, on social media, accused Moore of playing dirty, because Democratic House Rep. Sydney Batch, has been in and out of the hospital battling "early, non-invasive breast cancer" (the diagnosis given on her Facebook page).

While undergoing a mastectomy in early May, Batch was scheduled to take three weeks off from her official duties to facilitate her recovery process, but she ended bed rest early, apparently because she and her fellow party members feared Republicans were using her illness to pass the bill.

"My seatmate @friendsforbatch [Rep. Sydney Batch] is truly a bada**!" House Rep. Ashton Clemmons wrote in a tweet posted May 21. "She cares so much about her responsibility to represent her district that she came in 2 weeks after surgery for her ongoing cancer treatment for a critical vote!"

In a response to inquiries made by the Huffington Post, Moore responded, "Democrats are criticizing the standard House procedure of noticing a veto override on...the actual bipartisan bill, which bans an absolutely heinous practice of killing babies who weren't successfully aborted after they are born."

"North Carolina's leaders must take a stand together and say that we aren't New York, we aren't Virginia," said Republican state representative and bill supporter Pat McElraft. "We won't allow or try to let a living, breathing child that is born alive be left to die on their own without any care in our state."

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