The bill would have guaranteed basic medical care to infants delivered alive after botched abortions
SALEM, Oregon — Oregon Democrats have blocked consideration of a bill that would have guaranteed basic medical care to infants delivered alive after botched abortions.
House Bill 4087, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, would have required that “When a child is born alive and requires lifesaving treatment to survive, regardless of whether the child’s birth occurred by natural or induced labor, cesarean section or induced abortion, any health care practitioner who is present at the time the child is born alive shall” provide the “same degree of professional skill, care and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child that a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age,” including transportation to a hospital if born elsewhere.
Oregon Right to Life reported that the bill died in committee this week when 34 Democrats in the state House voted against bringing it to the floor, overpowering the 22 Republican votes supporting it. Among the opponents was Democrat state Rep. Cyrus Javadi, an ex-Republican who switched parties in 2025.
“It is tragic that Oregon’s current Democratic lawmakers are so committed to their party’s radical abortion agenda that they will not, at the very minimum, take action to ensure that babies who survive abortion attempts are treated with the same standard of care as any other newborn,” Oregon Right to Life executive director Lois Anderson said. “Defining required standards of care for abortion survivors should be a common ground position for all reasonable people, even if they do not identify themselves as pro-life. Oregon remains one of the most radical states on the issue of abortion, allowing elective procedures up to the moment of birth for any reason.”
The abortion lobby has long attempted to paint infanticide as an imaginary problem, but the facts show it is very real. “Although the United States fails to record reliable data on abortion survivors, we have estimated, through Canadian government extrapolations, that 1,734 infants are born alive after a failed abortion procedure every year in the United States,” the Abortion Survivors Network says. “In other words, about two out of every 1,000 abortions result in a live birth. After 49.5 years of Roe v Wade, 85,817 babies lived through an abortion procedure.”
In September 2024, the Family Research Council (FRC) wrote that “State-level abortion reporting statistics from nine states show that at least 277 infants have survived abortion since 2006.” Only eight states require reporting such data, and there are no federal reporting requirements on the subject, guaranteeing the real number is higher. Several former abortion industry insiders and policy scholars have told Congress or admitted under oath that infanticide after failed abortions happens beyond the notice of official numbers.
Infanticide is technically illegal nationwide under the under the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002. However, BAIPA “did not directly create civil or criminal penalties,” as admitted by a 2019 PolitiFact article (which nevertheless gave Trump a “False” rating on the subject, which LifeSiteNew dissected at the time). That law was “toothless and purely symbolic,” the article quoted University of Massachusetts law professor and Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund member Dwight Duncan as saying. Yet for at least the past decade, congressional Democrats have consistently voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would mandate basic medical care for abortion-surviving newborns with penalties that existing law lacks.
As of September 2024, only 18 states have laws requiring medical care for infants delivered alive after attempted abortions, according to FRC, leaving abortionists free to commit infanticide in a majority of the country.
The state of Oregon boasts that abortion is legal up to birth within its borders, with minors as young as 15 not even needing parental consent. Last year, state Democrats launched a “working group” with Planned Parenthood to protect abortion “access” from potential federal encroachment and allocated $7.5 million to Planned Parenthood to make up the difference of Medicaid reimbursements the abortion giant lost from the federal government.
– With reports by Calvin Freiburger with LifeSiteNews
