Only three Democrats voted against infanticide yesterday after the Senate’s roll call vote on GOP Sen. Ben Sasse’s (NE) Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
The bill would require abortion doctors to seek medical care for babies that survived abortions and would criminalize the deliberate killing of the child after delivery.
Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey voted alongside Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, also from the Keystone State, who had co-sponsored the bill with Sasse. Democratic Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who recently flipped his seat from Republican hands, also voted with Republicans Monday.
Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was the third Democrat to cross the aisle on this particular issue — a move that many likely expected after some of his more recent comments. Manchin was one of the only Democrats to stand during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address when the president called for an end to abortions after the unborn baby can feel pain.
Manchin said he supported a ban on abortions after 20 weeks because “late term abortions are just horrific…Totally just wrong.”
Sasse originally sought unanimous consent for his bill, however, Democratic Senator Patty Murray objected to the bill.
During a speech on the Senate floor earlier this month in support of the bill, Sasse said, “Everyone in the Senate ought to be able to say unequivocally that killing that little baby is wrong. This doesn’t take any political courage. And, if you can’t say that, if there’s a member of this body that can’t say that, there may be lots of work you can do in the world but you shouldn’t be here. You should get the heck out of any calling in public life where you pretend to care about the most vulnerable among us,” he said.
The Senator continued, “There should be no politics here that are right vs. left, or Republican vs. Democrat. This is the most basic thing you could be talking about. We’re talking about a little baby born alive and we have a public official in America defending the idea ‘Well, you could have a debate about killing her.’”
