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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Your timeline has errors. As reported in the article,

Year LBAA Survived Notes
2015 5 ? BAIPA signed
2016 5 ?
2017 3 ?
2018 3 ?
2019 3 0 Walz takes office
2020 0 0
2021 5 0
2022 0 0
2023 ? ? BAIPA repealed

So 8 live births after abortion (LBAA) occurred “under his watch,” while 0 survived. This is before any amendments to the law. But the article is incomplete; it didn’t include survivorship numbers for the pre-Walz years. Fortunately, those are included in the linked documents:

Year LBAA Survived Notes
2015 5 0 BAIPA signed
2016 5 0
2017 3 0
2018 3 0
2019 3 0 Walz takes office

Oh. It turns out that infants from their mother’s womb untimely torn don’t have a very good survivorship rate, even before Tim Walz gets involved. The linked reports break these down into more detail, too. Recurring phrases include “anomalies incompatible with life” and “APGAR score of 1.” Roughly a third received “comfort care” measures. We aren’t talking about squalling toddlers left out for the wolves. These are dying or brain-dead infants who cannot be saved by “reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice.”

One other thing I noticed in the 2015 report is that all of its LBAAs came from hospitals, not abortion clinics. Is it possible that the kind of late-term abortion which results in a born-alive infant is particularly dangerous? Say, when the health of the mother is most at risk?

It’s beside the point. Kirk posted his rant about how Walz treated eight children like trash. His data actually showed that Minnesota doctors perform triage in the rare, rare cases where infants are born alive after abortions. You filled in the gaps.

Doesn’t that deserve a fact check?

I made a comment early about how this all seems cargo cultish to me. Thank you for doing the work to collect the data on how many angels fit on the head of a pin in Minnesota in any given year, but I'm personally not interested in quibbling over the million-baby-skulls-a-year sized Baal-pit in which I as an American voter have been playing for the last couple generations.

This may sound to some readers like a woman saying "I'm not interested in quibbling over the government telling me what to do with my body" - I am also writing for you. Please consider that the dead babies are real. Those 10's of millions of lives snuffed out are real. Their right to life came from God. The "right" to an abortion was made up by communists.

I've considered it, and would like to politely suggest that He stop furnishing tiny, fragile clumps of cells with their own souls.

I can laugh about it with you and also gesture toward every other time we've tried to be clever with God

It's only funny and endearing if the end result is not a pile of a million dead baby skills a year

It’s beside the point. Kirk posted his rant about how Walz treated eight children like trash. His data actually showed that Minnesota doctors perform triage in the rare, rare cases where infants are born alive after abortions. You filled in the gaps.

Where are you getting this from? Is there some other report I'm missing where the doctors actually tried to save the baby's life? In none of the reports provided (2015-2022) is triage even mentioned, unless you count palliative care as triage.

In this case, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. When mitigating factors are present, such as the infant being pre-viability or otherwise unhealthy, they are mentioned. Legally they are required to mention such factors. So when, as is the case with about a third of these infants, no such issues are mentioned, we can be confident that they did not exist at all.

This is proof that abortion clinics (and hospitals) did not attempt to save healthy post-viability infants.

One other thing I noticed in the 2015 report is that all of its LBAAs came from hospitals, not abortion clinics. Is it possible that the kind of late-term abortion which results in a born-alive infant is particularly dangerous? Say, when the health of the mother is most at risk?

Or that abortion clinics are most likely to be staffed by ideological allies willing to round up in their reporting. If an infant is born breathing but obviously unhealthy, round that to not breathing; it was only breathing for a few minutes after all.

I agree that you can’t tell “heartbeat stopped two seconds out of the womb” from “heartbeat stopped in the trash can” based on this report. I don’t believe that justifies assuming the latter. The legal requirement for “reasonable” medical care is just as strong as the one for reporting mitigating factors.

It might be possible to track down birth and death certificates for these individuals. I’m sure they exist, but I have no idea if we have access to a vital records database.

Let me first state a few things I think we agree upon:

  1. It is quite difficult for abortion clinics to attempt to save the lives of infants who are born alive. NICU babies require quite a lot of care and these babies probably require as much or more, plus they're outside of a hospital where that care could be provided.
  2. Abortion clinics are probably already accustomed to hiding, at least to some extent, this specific situation--born-alive infants. The mothers are going to be traumatized if they hear the infant survived. Likely they already have procedures in place to spirit the infant away, living or dead, in order to protect the mother from this knowledge.
  3. Abortionists strongly support the right to kill healthy infants who were intended to be aborted. The "why" does not matter. Maybe they think infants have moral worth but that born-alive infants are rare enough to not be worth jeopardizing women's rights to bodily autonomy. Maybe they think infants don't have moral worth. But they certainly want to be allowed to kill healthy born-alive babies. We know this because they have enough pull to legalize doing this in at least one state. If the common people support legalizing this, the ones actually performing the abortions will doubtless be far more extreme.
  4. The existence of born-alive infants is politically inconvenient. You're acknowledging not only that some of these abortions are performed on viable babies, but also that the abortion procedure itself can potentially result in a living baby. Meaning, abortionists admit that the safest abortion in some cases is essentially just delivery of a viable child, except they kill the child first. At that point, why not just deliver the baby?

Keeping all of this in mind, I find it highly unlikely that abortion clinicians don't fudge the numbers.

You'll note that a few of the babies in the documents listed did not have any pre-existing conditions listed and also were not provided any care at all. These are living, breathing babies, capable of experiencing pain, who were left to die without so much as painkillers to ease their passing. I wouldn't trust someone capable of doing that to report something extremely inconvenient and damaging to the movement that owns their soul.

Putting all of that aside though...

The legal requirement for “reasonable” medical care is just as strong as the one for reporting mitigating factors.

Okay, and some of the infants were reported as having no mitigating factors and receiving no medical care at all. Lacking more information, I think we can assume that the legally mandated report is accurate, and that abortion clinicians would report factors favorable to their decision not to help the child if such factors existed.

I don’t believe that justifies assuming the latter.

Lacking more information I think we can assume that the information provided by abortion clinicians paints them in a maximally favorable light.

Damn it. Some day I will get a table to render correctly.

Edit: you gotta have three dashes in each column on your second line. So

|a |b|
|-|-|
| | |

is no bueno.