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Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, in just a few minutes, I will ask for a unanimous consent to pass my Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. This is a very simple bill, and it should be a noncontroversial one. It simply says that a baby born alive after an attempted abortion is entitled to the same protection and medical care that any other newborn baby is entitled to.
That is all. It doesn't limit abortion. It doesn't make abortion illegal. It simply states that a baby born alive after an attempted abortion is entitled to medical care, and yet somehow this bill is too much for my Democratic colleagues. Somehow saying that a living, breathing baby born alive after an attempted abortion is entitled to medical care is a step too far.
I would be interested to know exactly what it is that they are afraid of, and I suspect they are afraid that by pointing to the humanity of the born child, they might end up pointing to the humanity of the unborn child. After all, it makes no sense to say that a baby is not a human being a second before birth and is a human being a second after.
And so I suspect that Democrats are afraid that recognizing the humanity of a living, breathing, born child in an abortion clinic might end up leading to protection for unborn children.
And Democrats are apparently so determined to ensure that the supposed right to kill unborn children is protected that they are willing to oppose a law to protect born children.
It is a tragic measure of their extremism on this issue. And if anyone thinks that abortion isn't a slippery slope, that we can somehow devalue unborn babies' lives while maintaining respect for everyone else's, well, I am here to tell them differently, because we are at a point where roughly 50 percent of the U.S. Congress opposes protecting the lives of born human beings if they happen to be born alive after an attempted abortion.
In a matter of seconds now, one of my Democratic colleagues will object to this legislation. But I hope and pray that this will not be the last word and that, one day soon, we will get to a point where legislation like this will not be controversial and where human rights of every human being, born and unborn, will be respected.
204 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. THUNE. the following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Indiana (Mr. Braun), the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Cramer), the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Hoeven), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Marshall), the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan), and the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Tuberville).
Further, if present and voting: the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Hoeven) would have voted ``yea.''
The result was announced--yeas 88, nays 2, as follows: [Rollcall Vote No. 200 Leg.] YEAS--88 Baldwin Barrasso Bennet Blackburn Blumenthal Booker Boozman Britt Brown Budd Butler Cantwell Capito Cardin Carper Casey Cassidy Collins Coons Cornyn Cortez Masto Cotton Crapo Cruz Daines Duckworth Ernst Fischer Gillibrand Graham Grassley Hagerty Hassan Hawley Heinrich Hickenlooper Hirono Hyde-Smith Johnson Kaine Kelly Kennedy King Klobuchar Lankford Lee Lujan Lummis Manchin McConnell Merkley Moran Mullin Murkowski Murphy Murray Ossoff Padilla Paul Peters Reed Ricketts Risch Romney Rosen Rounds Rubio Schatz Schmitt Schumer Scott (FL) Scott (SC) Shaheen Smith Stabenow Tester Thune Tillis Van Hollen Vance Warner Warnock Warren Welch Whitehouse Wicker Wyden Young NAYS--2 Markey Sanders NOT VOTING--10 Braun Cramer Durbin Fetterman Hoeven Marshall Menendez Sinema Sullivan Tuberville
The motion was agreed to.
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