A law proposed to the Maryland legislature has pro-life advocates warning that it would seemingly allow for post-birth abortions up to 28 days after a child’s delivery, with the infants marked for death being forced to suffer without food or water until they expire.
Maryland Senate Bill 669, popularly known as the Pregnant Person’s Freedom Act of 2022, is more well known for changing “woman” to “person” when referring to individuals who are capable of bearing children, explains LifeSite.
According to American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) attorney Olivia Summers, it also allows for children to be abandoned to die for 28 days after birth with no questions asked:
In this case, as we are prepared to point out in our testimony, the bill also proposes a revision of the fetal murder/manslaughter statute that would serve to handcuff the investigation of infant deaths unrelated to abortion. In other words – this bill will effectively legalize infanticide. The exact language of the bill states: “This section may not be construed to authorize any form of investigation or penalty for a person . . . experiencing a . . . perinatal death related to a failure to act.” (Emphasis added). In other words, a baby born alive and well could be abandoned and left to starve or freeze to death, and nothing could be done to punish those who participated in that cruel death. The bill also includes a section that would allow “a person [to] bring a cause of action for damages if the person was subject to unlawful arrest or criminal investigation for a violation of this section as a result of . . . experiencing a . . . perinatal death.”
Thus, according to this bill, if a baby died because it was abandoned and police investigated and eventually arrested the person responsible for the baby’s death, then the woman could sue the police and get monetary damages for having been investigated and arrested.
LifeSite notes that, while Summers wrote that the state does not define “perinatal care,” a 2020 law defined it as the “provision of care during pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum and neonatal periods.” The website adds that one definition “defines it as ‘the 20th to 28th week of gestation’ to ‘1 to 4 weeks after birth.’”
This method of post-birth abortion – allowing a child to expire from lack of care – was popularized among Democrats in 2019, when former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam endorsed post-birth abortion after Democrats in that state proposed it in a law. The law ultimately failed.
The disgraced governor, who left office to an incoming wave of Republicans boosted by his unpopularity and the unpopularity of Terry McAuliffe, infamously promised that healthcare providers would “keep the baby comfortable” as it expired of natural causes if the mother elected to have a post-birth abortion.
Soon after his statements surfaced, it was revealed that Northam received $2 million in campaign contributions from Planned Parenthood.
