Planned Parenthood lobbies for 'post-birth abortion'

Lawmakers told mother's 'choice' to let babies die on table

Published: 6 hours ago
WND

A lobbyist for a regional division of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion business in the United States, says a doctor and a mother should be allowed to decide to kill a newborn who survives an abortion.

Alisa LaPolt Snow

The stunning position echoed statements made by Barack Obama while he was in the state Senate in Illinois, and repeatedly opposed a proposed law that would have obligated physicians to provide care to a baby surviving the abortion procedure.
The Planned Parenthood comments came at a recent Florida legislative hearing from Alisa LaPolt Snow, who was opposing a proposal that would require a doctor to provide care to an infant whom an abortion failed to kill.
Lawmakers were stunned, asking the same question over and over.
“So, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief,” said Rep. Jim Boyd. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”
Snow’s response?
“We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”
The same, or very similar, questions followed several times, as if the lawmakers could not believe the position advocated.


Princeton’s Peter Singer (Photo: The Age)

“You stated that a baby born alive on a table as a result of a botched abortion that that decision should be left to the doctor and the family. Is that what you’re saying?” wondered Rep. Jose Oliva.
Snow didn’t change her response.
“That decision should be between the patient and the health care provider,” she said.
When one lawmaker suggested at that point the “patient” also would include the newborn, Snow responded, “That’s a very good question. … I would be glad to have some more conversations with you about this.”
The Weekly Standard reported that Snow diverted the conversation when another lawmaker specifically asked, “What objection could you possibly have to obligate a doctor to transport a child born alive to a hospital where it seems to me they would be most likely to be able to survive?”
She responded that in some rural situations “the hospital is 45 minutes or an hour away” and said “logistical issues” were concerning.

WND has reported before on the idea of “post-birth” abortion, including when a Princeton “bioethicist” announced he’d allow the killing of disabled babies after they were born if that was in the “best interests” of the family.
Those comments came from Peter Singer, a controversial bioethics professor, who responded to a series of questions in the UK Independent several years ago.
WND had reported Singer believes the next few decades will see a massive upheaval in the concept of life and rights, with only “a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists” still protecting life as sacrosanct.
To the rest, it will be a commodity to be re-evaluated regularly for its worth.
His newest sermon on his beliefs came in a question-and-answer interview the Independent set up with readers.
Singer’s response came to Dublin reader Karen Meade’s question: “Would you kill a disabled baby?”
“Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole. Many people find this shocking, yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion,” he said.

He added that one point on which he agrees with the pro-life movement is that, “from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the fetus and the newborn baby.”
The statement furthers the arguments that Singer’s position is just an extension of the culture of death that has developed in the world, with euthanasia legal in some locations, abortion legal in many and even charges that in some repressive societies there’s an active business in harvesting healthy organs from victims in order to provide transplants for the wealthy.
“At least he’s consistent,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told LifeSiteNews.com at the time.
Singer holds that man is no different from other forms a life, and therefore man’s life is not worth more than, for example, a cow.
He told readers he’d kill 10 cows before killing one human, but that’s not because they are of less value, only that humans would mourn.
“I’ve written that it is much worse to kill a being who is aware of having a past and a future, and who plans for the future. Normal humans have such plans, but I don’t think cows do,” he said.
Obama was a member of the Illinois legislature when he decided to not support a bill to provide medical care for newborns who survived failed late-term abortions.

Along about 2002, when Illinois was considering plan that apparently was similar to what Florida lawmakers were reviewing, he said: “I just want to be clear because I think this was the source of the objections of the medical society. As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child – however way you want to describe it – is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that its nonviable but there’s, lets say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just out limp and dead, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved. Is that correct?”
He continued, “Let me just go to the bill, very quickly. I think, as this emerged during debate and during committee, the only plausible rationale, to my mind, for this legislation would be if you had a suspicion that a doctor, the attending physician, who has made an assessment that this is a nonviable fetus and that, let’s say for the purposes of the mother’s health, is being – that – that labor is being induced, that that physician (a) is going to make the wrong assessment and (b) if the physician discovered, after the labor had been induced, that, in fact, he made an error, or she made an error, and, in fact, that that physician, of his own accord or her own accord, would not try to exercise the sort of medical measures and practices that would be involved in saving that child. Now, if – if you think that there are possibilities that doctors would not do that, then maybe this bill makes sense, but I – I suspect and my impression is, is that the medical society suspects as well that doctors feel that they would be under that obligation, that they would already be making these determinations and that, essentially, adding a – an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion. Now, if that’s the case … and I know that some of us feel very strongly one way or another on that issue, that’s fine, but I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if these children are being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they’re looked after.”

WND columnist Nat Hentoff has written on the subject.
“No previous president has been so radically pro-abortion as Obama, who, when he was in the Illinois Senate, voted three times against the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. The bill would have ensured that if a live baby fully emerged before an abortion was successfully completed, he or she was to be saved,” he said.
“To let this legislation die would be an act of infanticide, but it did not pass while Obama was in the Illinois Senate. ”
He continued, “State Sen. Obama insisted that the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act interfered with a woman’s reproductive rights. But wanted or not, the child had been born, and preventing him or her from continuing to live was infanticide!”

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