Alabama House Approves ‘Born Alive’ Abortion Bill

The Alabama House of Representatives got back to the business of criminalizing women’s healthcare on Tuesday night by approving a bill that would give doctors prison sentences if they fail to treat babies “born alive” after an attempted abortion.

The bill is now moving to the Alabama Senate.

It has been only one week since Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey signed a bill that would outlaw all abortions in the state after six weeks.

Under this legislation, doctors would face 20-year prison sentences for failing to provide reasonable care to save a “child born alive after an abortion or attempted abortion.”

However, Alabama Democrats are calling the legislation just another way to criminalize abortion providers – and there are no records of a child being born alive during an attempted abortion in the state because Alabama already doesn’t allow late-term abortions at or after 22 weeks of pregnancy.

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, babies born before 23 weeks of pregnancy rarely survive.

Unsurprisingly, Republican Representative Ginny Shaver was not able to offer any statistics of people surviving attempting abortions or of babies born alive during an abortion, but she said it could potentially happen and believes it has.

However, these bills are based mostly on propaganda in order to push the lie that abortions regularly occur immediately before the time of birth. That’s simply not true – after viability, any intentional act to end the life of an infant is obviously illegal.

Statistics point to the facts – a healthy fetus could potentially survive outside of the womb at approximately 24 weeks and less than 1 percent of abortions occur after that point.

The only time there is an abortion after 24 weeks is if there is a high chance that the mother could die. In cases of an abortion past 20 weeks, a drug is injected to ensure the fetus is not alive prior to the extraction.

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