NC Senate Delivers Stunning Abortion Defeat, Overrides Gov's Veto of Bill To Protect Newborns from Infanticide
Republicans in the North Carolina state Senate, joined by a single Democrat, voted Tuesday to overturn Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that would protect newborn babies from infanticide.
Now, it’s up to the state House of Representatives.
The “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” Senate Bill 359, is meant to protect newborn babies who survived abortion from potential murder or neglect and requires health care providers present give those babies the same treatment provided “to any child born alive at the same gestational age.”
The bill would also make “any person who intentionally performs or attempts to perform an overt act that kills a child born alive punishable for murder” under state law.
Cooper vetoed the bill last month, saying the extra legal protection for newborns is unnecessary, according to The News & Observer.
“Laws already protect newborn babies and this bill is an unnecessary interference between doctors and their patients,” Cooper said in his veto message, the News & Observer reported.
“This needless legislation would criminalize doctors and other healthcare providers for a practice that simply does not exist.”
But as some Republican senators pointed out throughout the debate over the bill, extra protection for newborns isn’t “unnecessary” or “needless.”
“We don’t know if it’s going on here,” Rep. Sarah Stevens said in reference to post-birth abortions, according to The News & Observer.
“But what we did say is, ‘you now have a duty to report. Nurses, doctors, if you see something, you have a duty to report.’ And that’s a big part of this bill.”
After Cooper issued his April 18 veto, two of the bill’s biggest supporters, state Sen. Joyce Krawiec and state Rep. Pat McElraft, issued a joint statement saying that “caring for a living, breathing newborn infant is too restrictive for Governor Cooper’s radical abortion agenda.”
“We thought Democrats would agree that children born alive should be separate from the abortion debate, but it’s clear they want the ‘right to choose’ to even extend past birth,” the statement said.
These Republicans are spot-on — it’s strange that Cooper would veto the bill if he wasn’t in favor of murdering newborn babies.
North Carolina’s governor made it perfectly clear where he stands on the infanticide debate, and voters will remember that.
Voters should also remember which party stood up for the life of the most vulnerable.
According to WRAL, while two Democratic senators voted for the “born-alive” bill originally, only one, Sen. Don Davis voted to override Cooper’s veto.
That vote was crucial to the override obtaining the three-fifths majority it needed, WRAL reported. It passed 30-20.
It’s still up to North Carolina’s House of Representatives to land the final blow. The House is scheduled to vote on overriding the governor’s veto on Thursday.
That will likely be a harder struggle for override supporters, according to WRAL, but however that turns out, the Senate vote is a defeat for the governor — and the Democratic abortion agenda.
It’s a tough fight to override a veto, but protecting newborn babies from infanticide is worth the effort.
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