It is worth examining why Sasse’s legislation, which now has 42 Republican cosponsors, is neither redundant nor unnecessary. Most important, there is no existing federal law that prohibits the denial of medical care to infants born alive in the context of abortion, which is what this bill would do.
In 2002, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA) passed Congress by unanimous consent and was signed into law by President George W. Bush, establishing that the terms “person,” “human being,” “child,” and “individual” in federal law include every infant born alive, even after an abortion. But that’s all it did — it instituted no penalties for physicians who neglected to care for such infants.
That’s what Sasse’s bill is for, enacting an explicit requirement that newborns be afforded “the same degree” of care that “any other child born alive at the same gestational age” would receive. As of 2014, only 26 states had some kind of statute mandating care for infants born alive after an attempted abortion, and as of 2016, only six states required even reporting such births at all. What’s more, those state laws can be changed to remove existing protections.
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