"What the heck is that?" Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebr.) demanded. A CNN reporter, in a desperate bid to tie infanticide to the abortion debate, had coined an interesting phrase: "a fetus that was born." Caroline Kelly was trying to keep to the Democrats' talking points by describing Sasse's bill as a measure that would "require abortion providers to work to 'preserve the life and health' of a fetus that was born following an attempted abortion as they would for a newborn baby." There's just one problem. A fetus that was born is a newborn baby.
"It's another way of saying they don't want to debate the actual debate we're having on the floor today," Sasse fumed, as his liberal colleagues tried to defend a vote for legal infanticide. "[My Born-Alive measure deals with] babies that are born, that are outside their mother" -- not fetuses, he argued. "There's nothing in the bill that's about abortion. Nothing." Sasse said flatly. "It's about infanticide. That's the actual legislation. And you've got 44 people over there who want to hide from it and talk in euphemisms about abortion because they don't want to defend the indefensible, because you can't defend the indefensible."
"Child," Becket Adams fired back in the Washington Examiner. "The word they're looking for 'child.'" "Do CNN editors not know what the bill would do," Tim Carney asked in another scathing op-ed, "or do they believe that letting a living, already born baby die counts as an abortion?" At what point, exactly, do we start referring to them as what they are, Adams wanted to know. "When it no longer complicates the pro-choice argument?"
Calling an abortion survivor a "fetus that was born" is like referring to a spouse as a "single person who got married." The "contortion and intentional obfuscation," NRO's Alexandra DeSanctis (who considered changing her Twitter handle to "a fetus that was born") thinks it all "speaks for itself."
In other words, if you're looking for the truth about the Sasse's bill and America's desperate need for it, skip the mainstream media. Check out FRC's new issue brief, "Born-Alive Survivors: Just the Facts." It answers all kinds of questions the Left cannot, like: Do babies survive failed abortions? Aren't there already laws in place against infanticide? Shouldn't it be up to the doctor how to treat an infant? Aren't late-term abortions only performed when the baby has a fetal abnormality? And more. Get real answers to real questions from FRC experts here.
