Missouri’s new anti-abortion law will hurt families in medical crisis

It takes a special kind of cruelty to meddle in end of life care for political reasons. 

The so-called “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” passed last week does just that. It is part of a longstanding strategy of abortion opponents using the tragedies of aspiring parents who have to end wanted pregnancies in order to stigmatize and restrict all abortion.  

Because the public is largely supportive of abortion early in pregnancy, abortion opponents like to focus on later procedures. Because people who don’t want to be pregnant have abortions as early as possible, abortion opponents vilify procedures that are often needed due to medical tragedies in very wanted pregnancies.

“Born Alive” bills, introduced in many states and federally, are based on the lie that viable babies are surviving failed abortions and need legal protection from infanticide or medical neglect. This is not a thing. 

What is very much a thing is that sometimes pregnancies go very wrong, forcing would-be parents to make very difficult decisions. Some parents who learn their baby has a life-limiting anomaly prefer not to have demise occur in utero so that they can meet the baby that they know will not survive. 

Inducing labor to end a doomed pregnancy is not what most people think of as an “abortion,” but it meets the definition under Missouri law, which is “the intentional termination of the pregnancy of a mother by using or prescribing any instrument, device, medicine, drug or other means or substance with an intention other than to increase the probability of a live birth or to remove a dead unborn child.” 

That state law once explicitly excluded removal of a “dead or dying unborn child,” but our legislature deleted “or dying” in 2019.

The “Born Alive” legislation mandates that after an abortion, a medical professional must “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care and diligence to preserve the life, health and comfort of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care provider would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” 

That will be read by some doctors and hospital attorneys to mean dying babies must receive aggressive and futile medical interventions.  

It jeopardizes the option of what the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists calls perinatal alliative comfort care, which is exclusively palliative care without the intent to prolong the baby’s life. 

Taking that away could mean that the precious little time you have holding your newborn can be taken away from you for interventions that you don’t want. It can mean the few days you might have together at home are instead spent in the NICU. As Mallory Schwarz of Abortion Action Missouri explained at a legislative hearing on the bill: “Resuscitation would require CPR, which could break that tiny infant’s ribs.”

The bill’s sponsors insisted that it isn’t a ban on palliative care. But they also said the bill is necessary despite the many existing laws that protect newborn babies because it requires medical care that isn’t currently required. Determining what that newly required care is will be left to doctors at risk of being charged with murder and risk-averse lawyers.  

This is another instance of legislators denying responsibility for the inevitable effects of their intrusive and poorly drafted anti-abortion laws.

As they did with miscarrying women who were denied treatment when Missouri’s abortion ban was in effect, proponents of abortion criminalization are treating grieving parents as justifiable collateral damage.

There is no justification for any risk of making life worse for aspiring parents who are saying goodbye to a dying baby — especially for legislation that does not address a real problem. 

But Missouri Republicans have decided that the legislation is useful to their effort to paint abortion as gruesome, portray physicians as murderers, and slur their colleagues across the aisle as being supporters of infanticide. 

It appears that they see the political benefit of their messaging legislation as worth whatever unintended harms to babies and parents in crisis they will inflict.

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