Cory Booker: Bill to Care for Babies Born Alive Meant to “Create Schisms”

Presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) traveled to Sioux City, Iowa on Tuesday where he said a recent pro-life bill was meant to “create schisms and differences between us.”

Although Booker never mentioned the name of the bill, it appears he is discussing the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which failed in the Senate in February, 53-44, with only Democrats, including Booker, voting against it. The bill, S. 311, would have required doctors to provide medical care and treatment for babies who survive abortions.

“This recent bill caused a lot of controversy, right?” Booker asked the crowd gathered at Sioux City Public Museum. “People, you know, from church communities that I frequent say to me, ‘Did you vote against this thing that allows us to kill babies when they’re born?'”

The New Jersey senator continued:

That is a felony. That is a crime. That cannot happen under any law. This was something that was put forward to try to further create schisms and differences between us. You cannot kill a child after birth in this country. That is against the law.

Booker was articulating the talking points of the abortion industry and its allies in government – that Republicans are trying to create “schisms” because infanticide is already against the law.

However, as the nation discovered during the trial of Kermit Gosnell – convicted of murdering babies born alive after abortion – government and health departments often look the other way when it comes to inspecting abortion clinics.

Gosnell had been operating for decades in his West Philadelphia abortion clinic without inspection, and his “house of horrors” was only discovered during a prescription drug bust in 2010.

Even after the Gosnell murder conviction, Planned Parenthood – America’s largest provider of abortions – always opposes legislation that attempts to ensure abortion clinics are required to hold to the same health and safety standards as other outpatient clinics.

Additionally, New York’s new Reproductive Health Act, as well as legislation proposed in states such as Virginia, Illinois, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, would allow abortions up until the moment of birth and, in some cases, eliminatethe requirement that babies who survive the procedure be provided with medical care.

The 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful also stated that late-term abortions serve as the last option for a woman whose life is in danger while giving birth:

For women that are really in that difficult position, so-called late-term abortions, some people try to make that think that that’s something that commonly happens. That happens when a woman’s life is being threatened and the viability of the fetus as well is compromised.

As Lila Rose, president of pro-life organization Live Action, tweeted in February, even abortionists themselves – such as Ron Fitzsimmons, director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted, “The majority of these procedures [late-term abortions] are performed … on healthy women and healthy fetuses.”

A study released in 2013 by the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute also found that women who were seeking both first-trimester and late-term abortions provided the same reasons for delaying their abortions, including “not knowing about the pregnancy,” “trouble deciding about the abortion,” and “disagreeing about the abortion with the man involved.”

The study concluded that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”

“Abortion is not a procedure done in true emergency situations,” wroteRose and OB/GYN Dr. Donna Harrison, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in a column at the Washington Examiner. “The purpose of an abortion is to produce a dead baby, not to separate the mother and the baby.”

Regardless of the abortion bill Booker was referencing in his talk in Iowa, the senator has helpedto block the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban abortion after the fifth month of pregnancy, and voted against the Born-Alive bill.

The senator’s views, however, are contrary to results of a Marist poll releasedin February that found Americans largely oppose later-term abortions, with 71 percent saying abortion should be generally illegal during the third trimester, an outcome that includes 60 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 85 percent of Republicans.

According to the poll, Americans also strongly oppose abortion past 20 weeks of pregnancy by an even wider margin: 71 to 18 percent.