2 October 2024
ROCHESTER — Minnesota’s new abortion law was at the center of the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and U.S. Sen. JD Vance squared off on issues impacting the nation.
GOP criticism, both in the state and nationally, of changes to Minnesota’s abortion laws has been heightened since Walz was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. In their only presidential debate, former President Donald Trump slammed Harris’ selection of Walz and his stand on abortion.
“Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine,” Trump said. “He also says execution after birth — it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born OK. And that’s not OK with me.”
When asked about Trump’s comments during Tuesday’s debate, Walz was swift in his response.
“That’s not what the bill says,” Walz said. “In Minnesota, what we did is restore Roe v. Wade. We made sure that we put women in charge of their health care.”
Vance later called the state’s abortion law “fundamentally barbaric,” claiming that a “doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”
“Whether you’re pro-choice or pro-abortion — that is fundamentally barbaric,” Vance said.
“That’s not true, that’s not what the law says,” Walz interjected.
The topic has also been a hot-button issue in Southeast Minnesota.
In a forum last week at the Rochester Public Library, Rep. Duane Quam of Byron claimed that changes to the state’s abortion laws allowed an infant who survives an abortion to be “set aside to die.”
The statement was met with disbelief from an audience member and his DFL challenger. But the Byron Republican claimed that harrowing possibility now exists because of changes to a decades-old abortion law.
But what was that change?
The statute’s old language had required that responsible medical personnel take “all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice” to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.”
The legislation swapped the phrase “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant” for a new requirement that called on medical professionals “to care for the infant who is born alive.”
To Quam, the change meant a lower standard of care, that a baby who survived an abortion could now be denied life-saving measures.
What’s more, he argued, the same 2023 Minnesota law got rid of a reporting requirement that obligated the state to produce a report stating the number of babies born after an attempted abortion and what happened to them.
“They removed the language that required that if a child survives an abortion, you must give appropriate care to help them survive,” Quam said. “And they went farther (by) removing the requirement for collecting the data.”
Heather Holmes, Quam’s DFL challenger to represent House District 24A, called Quam’s criticisms “blatantly false and misleading.” The vast majority of women who lose their pregnancies at a late stage aren’t seeking abortions, she said. They are planning for a new life by painting a nursery, buying a crib and picking out a name for the baby in hopeful expectancy, she said.
What does the bill mean? DFL Rep. Tina Liebling, the bill’s principal sponsor, calls the GOP interpretation of the changes a scare tactic, a “flat-out lie.”
She says the obligation of a doctor to an infant born alive is no different from his responsibilities toward a patient who has undergone surgery. There is nothing spelled out in statute about a doctor’s responsibilities toward such a patient. And the reason the law is silent on the matter is because it’s viewed as part of a doctor’s job, their ethical code. The same holds true for an infant who is born alive.
“Doctors and hospitals have legal and ethical obligations toward their patients that an infant born alive has the rights and protections of other people,” Liebling said. “We don’t have to dictate what the standard of care should be because it’s already clear.”
In the House debate over the legislation in January 2023, Liebling told lawmakers that the change in language from “preserve” to “care” was to avoid tragic situations such as when an infant is delivered with a fatal defect and a doctor feels compelled to provide “aggressive care” regardless of the parents’ wishes.
Such scenarios could only compound the pain of loss. Instead of allowing parents a few moments of comfort with their child who may have only a few hours to live, a medical professional was compelled under the old law to intervene to keep the infant alive “whether or not the parents want that” and regardless of the pain it might inflict on the child.
Liebling said the word “care” should be interpreted broadly. Whether a decision is made to take “extraordinary measures” to prolong the life of a child or measures be taken to provide comfort care or “letting the parents hold their infant for a few minutes as it dies,” it is a private decision best left between parents and their doctors. The old law “confused” the matter, and the new law removed politicians from the equation.
Liebling’s arguments didn’t mollify House Republicans. The disagreement hinged largely on how each side defined its terms. Some GOP lawmakers were mystified at what the word “care” meant in the context of an infant born alive. (The new language applied to all infants born alive and not just one who survives an abortion.)
“I just don’t know what the definition of care is in this instance,” said GOP Rep. Peggy Scott of Andover. “Is it palliative care? Is it lifesaving care? Why remove the language requiring preserving life and health?”
GOP Rep. Jeff Backer of Browns Valley, an opponent of the bill, fretted about the implications of “comfort care” and found the changes to the language inadequate and worrisome. An emergency medical technician, Backer recalled vainly trying to save the life of a baby 21 weeks into gestation in the back of an ambulance.
He argued that if he had given comfort care as he understood the phrase to mean to the infant born in the back of the ambulance, it was tantamount to murder.
“Comfort care means lay on a hard surface, maybe a blanket. Comfort care is not medical lifesaving care. That is wrong. It’s wrong for all of us, to even allow us to put up with that,” Backer said.
But Liebling said an infant born alive is no different than any other patient.
“Clearly an infant born alive is a person and has a right to care that is appropriate given the situation, that they are just like every other patient,” she said.
Instances of infants surviving an abortion procedure are rare. Under the Born Alive Protections Act, which passed in 2015, the Department of Health reported 24 babies born after an attempted abortion during the eight years that law was in effect.
All the babies died. Ten of the cases involved fatal fetal conditions “incompatible with life.” Four babies were deemed too underdeveloped to live on their own. Two were barely clinging to life before they died.
For seven of them, “comfort care measures were provided as planned” without offering any detail of what those measures were. In one situation, a baby born alive in 2017, the report states that “no specific steps were taken to preserve life were reported.”
Liebling said repealing the reporting requirement on babies who survive abortions wasn’t isolated. It was part of a number of other reporting requirements that were eliminated. She called the requirement “intrusive.”
“If abortion is health care, which I believe it is, especially late in pregnancy like that, it (requires) a level of reporting and intrusion that we don’t do for other things,” Liebling said, adding that hospitals are already mandated to report deaths to the state.
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