North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper this morning vetoed a born-alive infant protection bill requiring life-saving care for babies who survive abortions.
Cooper, a first-term Democrat, had earlier criticized the bill through a spokesman. Senate Bill 359, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, similar to one struggling for traction in the U.S. Senate, was passed by the state Senate by a 28-19 margin on Monday and by the House, 65-46, on Tuesday.
State Rep. Pat McElraft, a Republican and the House’s deputy majority whip, had offered emotional testimony in support of the bill. She told Decision in a statement after Cooper vetoed it: “Caring for a living, breathing, newborn infant is too restrictive for Governor Cooper’s radical abortion agenda. We thought Democrats would agree that children born alive in a failed abortion should be separate from the abortion debate, but it’s clear that they want the ‘right to choose’ to even extend past birth. This makes for a very sad day in North Carolina.”
A spokesman for the governor had told reporters earlier in the week that the bill was “unnecessary legislation” for a problem that “simply does not exist.”
But those words contradicted shocking testimony by McElraft in the House chamber. McElfaft, a former phlebotomist, told of being shown the dead bodies of refrigerated pre-born babies while she was working at Onslow Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in the 1970s. According to multiple news reports, McElraft said nurses at the hospital told her that an abortion doctor would take babies that survived late-term abortions and drown them in saline.
McElraft’s testimony jibes with statistics from the federal Centers for Disease Control, which reported that between 2003-2014, 143 babies survived abortion procedures in the six states that tracked those statistics for the government.
Writing Wednesday in his Washington Update, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins noted of the CDC’s numbers: “The lifeless bodies Pat McElraft saw weren’t included—just like the hundreds of undocumented ‘snippings’ and blows to the head by monsters like Kermit Gosnell and Douglas Karpen.”
Perkins added that “it will take every single Republican and eight Democrats (one in the Senate and seven in the House) to override [a veto by Cooper]. Hopefully, they’ll find the courage that Reps. Raymond Smith (D), Garland Pierce (D), Charles Graham (D), and James Gailliard (D) did to stand up to their party and end birth-day abortion.”
Feature Image: Alamy Stock Photo