Tea at Trianon: Banning Infanticide

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Banning Infanticide

From The National Review:

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.

New York’s Reproductive Health Act, for example, explicitly repealed section 4164 of the state’s public-health law, which had stated that children born alive during an abortion received all the protections of state law. A proposed bill in Virginia would downgrade the requirement that physicians care for born-alive infants from a “must” to a “shall” standard, a legally significant distinction. And, of course, it was that same bill that prompted the comments of Virginia governor Ralph Northam, who appeared to suggest that infants could be allowed to die in some circumstances — the remarks that spurred Sasse to call for unanimous consent on his legislation. (Read more.)