Monday night (2/4/19) Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska introduced a bill to the US Senate requesting a unanimous vote to condemn infanticide and make it illegal. What should have been a cut and dry unanimous decision ended up being blocked by Senate Democrats.
Sasse’s Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act simply sought
“to prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.”
The bill had nothing to do with a woman’s right to choose, “reproductive healthcare”, Roe v Wade, or even abortion limits. It was about protecting newborn children. After the New York Abortion bill stripped away protections for newborn children and the recent statements made by Virginia’s Governor Northam and state Senator Tran supporting infanticide, this bill would make such heinous actions illegal. Coincidentally, this bill bears a striking resemblance to the three Illinois senate bills that then-Senator Barack Obama shot down in 2001, 2002, & 2003.
Senator Sasse made it quite clear that this wasn’t about babies in the womb, it was about newborns that survived abortions.
“We are actually talking about babies that have been born. The only debate on the floor tonight is about infanticide,” Sasse said, “Everyone in this Senate ought to be able to say that the little baby deserves life, that she has rights, and that killing her is wrong.”
All of the Democrat senators left the chambers except for Washington Senator Patty Murray. She objected to the bill saying that it was unnecessary because there were already laws in place outlawing such infanticide. One would think that were true, but it is not. In reality only 26 states have laws in place protecting newborns that survived abortions.
After Murray left, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst took the floor. “There is nothing great, there is nothing moral or even humane, about the discussion that we have before us today,” Ernst stated, “Somehow this conversation has devolved so completely that a bill prohibiting the murder of children who are born alive. A bill that simply prohibits infanticide, has tonight been blocked on the floor of the Senate.”
Oklahoma Senator James Lankford asked how it could even be a discussion on the senate floor. He went on to say, “It used to be my Democratic colleagues said life begins at birth. Now, apparently, it’s not at birth anymore. It’s unknown when life begins. Because it’s a discussion now at birth.”
Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mike Braun of Indiana also shared their disgust that anyone would object to such a common-sense bill.
Why, might you ask, would Democrats block a bill that did something as basic as making infanticide illegal?
National Review Staff Writer Alexandra Desanctis explains that “although the bill doesn’t restrict abortion rights, it brings into crystal-clear focus the irrationality of the pro-abortion position. If those who support abortion concede that perhaps there is something wrong with permitting an infant to die the moment after birth if it was meant to have been aborted one minute earlier, suddenly the question becomes, “Why is it acceptable to perform that abortion one minute earlier?”
Desanctis continues,
“If the infant has moral status when it is wholly outside the womb, why not one minute earlier when it is partially, or even wholly, inside his or her mother? Does the moral status of this human being hinge on its developmental stage or its location? These are the types of questions that defenders of the abortion movement will do anything to avoid confronting.”
In the past the Democratic Party was known as the the party of Jim Crow, segregation, & slavery. But that is all in the past. After Monday night they became known as the party of infanticide.
God help us.
The View Point 
Nick,
God help us indeed, dark clouds are gathering.
I set out below part of a comment I found on WordPress recently:
“It seems the collective consciousness that pervades public discourse can only conceive of “sin” in broad social categories, where individual agency is secondary to all else. This perspective reduces man to his material condition—whether it be his economic circumstances, skin color, or sex. Of course the role of culture in the formation of human personality cannot be completely ignored—all that man is, his ability to reason and make moral decisions, is largely founded in his cultural inheritance. However, talking about culture as its own autonomous order solely determined by nature and materialism is not enough to account for the complexity of human agency. Culture is first formed by man’s religious experience, rooted in the fact that he possesses an immaterial soul. To neglect this dimension is to confuse the very nature of man and how he relates to culture.
This tendency to wrap individuality up in an autonomous social order is nothing new. Romano Guardini, an influential Catholic intellectual and priest of the early twentieth century, predicted many of these developments in his book, The End of the Modern World. In it, he notes how the time of “modern man” is coming to an end and a new man is emerging. He calls this man “Mass Man.” He calls him this because the Mass Man is formed by the “masses”—whether it be the “masses” of human culture or the “mass” amount of technology and industrialization that isolates him from the world. Guardini describes Mass Man as the “Man Without Personality” because the “regimented instincts” of this man “forbid him to appear distinctive, compel him to appear anonymous. Mass Man acts almost as if he felt that to be one’s self was both the source of all injustice and even a sign of peril.” Individual personality and agency are destroyed for Mass Man. Man as an individual is left to be subsumed in the masses which arbitrate the new standards of morality, which today are consent-based sexual ethics, limitless human rights created ex nihilo, and in our case, the social sin of “toxic masculinity.”
The Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen observes this tendency on a more pastoral note in his forward to St. Maximlian Kolbe’s Will to Love. He sees how “for many decades past [in Catholicism], emphasis was put on individual sanctification but with little stress on social justice.” However, now there is a “reaction to the other extreme, when if one carries the banner for racial justice or marches in a protest parade against the building of an atomic reactor, he will find so-called theologians who will deny any guilt to fornicators and those who violate the natural laws of God.” The paradigm shifted from seeing sin primarily as a personal harm against God or neighbor, to sin being primarily a corporate reality where lack of concern for global issues is the primary cause for contrition.”
To summarise what is said above:
Guardini describes Mass Man as the “Man Without Personality” because the “regimented instincts” of this man “forbid him to appear distinctive” and: “Individual personality and agency are destroyed for Mass Man. Man as an individual is left to be subsumed in the masses which arbitrate the new standards of morality”.
The paradigm shifted from seeing sin primarily as a personal harm against God or neighbor, to sin being primarily a corporate reality where lack of concern for global issues is the primary cause for contrition.” (Fulton Sheen).
That is the shift we have witnessed in the culture: from personal sin to “regimented instincts” where “Individual personality and agency are destroyed” and the “individual is left to be subsumed in the masses which arbitrate the new standards”, which pope John Paul II called “the culture of death” some decades ago.
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