Dems make a stand on ... denying health care to babies

You hear a lot about the radicalism of the Republican Party, but almost every House Democrat just voted to deny infants access to medical care.

The House of Representatives passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act Wednesday by a vote of 220 to 210. The bill would require doctors to provide the same care to infants who survive abortion attempts as “would reasonably be provided to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” Doctors who fail to provide such care to abortion survivors, and employees who witness and fail to report a doctor’s malpractice, would be subject to “a fine, up to five years in prison, or both.”

All but two House Democrats voted no. Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez voted present, and his colleague Rep. Henry Cuellar was the bill’s lone Democratic supporter.

The fact that House Democrats almost unanimously opposed a measure to protect live children outside their mothers’ wombs obviously reflects the party’s radicalism. But it also signals that the party has adopted a more logically coherent, if morally abominable, position on abortion.

[I’d call it a more consistent policy on infanticide. It puts lie to their framing of this as a right of “choice” for the mother over her own body. It makes explicit their broad-based hostility to infants and reproduction — so much so that they’re willing to contradict their support for universal health care. — Ed]