Missouri enacts law requiring medical care for newborns who survive abortions

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act that cracks down on infanticide in the state.

JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) – Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a new law guaranteeing basic medical care to newborns who survive attempted abortions to crack down on the practice of infanticide. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act guarantees any “child born alive during or after an abortion or an attempted abortion shall have all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state, including any other liveborn child”; and specifically mandates that he or she be given the “same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life, health, and comfort of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care provider would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.”

“A person shall have the right to bring a cause of action under sections 537.080 to 537.090 or chapter 538 for any injury arising from a violation of the provisions of subsection 3 of this section,” the law added. “Anyone who commits an ‘overt act’ to kill a newborn delivered alive is guilty of first-degree murder.” The bill also charges the state’s Pregnancy Associated Mortality Review Board with investigating “maternity care deserts,” i.e., “counties in which access to maternity care services is limited or absent, either through a lack of services or through barriers to a woman’s ability to access care within a county.”

The new law comes as the state is unable to directly ban abortions, and courts have deemed a variety of lesser restrictions impermissible. In November 2024, Missouri residents approved a state constitutional amendment establishing a purported “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” that applies to “all matters relating to (so-called) reproductive health care, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, (so-called) abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions.” It prohibits the legislature from banning abortion until “fetal viability” and after “viability” if an abortionist claims that killing a woman’s unborn child is deemed “needed to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.”

The amendment effectively invalidated the state’s near-total abortion ban, which only allowed abortion when allegedly necessary to avoid the mother’s death or “substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” Pro-lifers hope to change things this fall when another amendment will appear on the ballot. If approved it would ban abortion except for rape and incest in the first trimester or for “medical emergencies” throughout pregnancy, along with banning taxpayer funding for abortion or youth gender “transitions.”

Republican state Sen. Mike Moon is also proposing a different amendment that would establish personhood at conception and clarify there is no constitutional right to abortion. That proposal does not directly ban abortion but could be interpreted as requiring a stronger prohibition than the other amendment. Meanwhile, the abortion lobby has long attempted to paint infanticide as an imaginary problem, but the facts show it is very real.

“Although the United States fails to record reliable data on abortion survivors, we have estimated, through Canadian government extrapolations, that 1,734 infants are born alive after a failed abortion procedure every year in the United States,” the Abortion Survivors Network says. “In other words, about two out of every 1,000 abortions result in a live birth. After 49.5 years of Roe v Wade, 85,817 babies lived through an abortion procedure.”

In September 2024, the Family Research Council (FRC) wrote that “State-level abortion reporting statistics from nine states show that at least 277 infants have survived abortion since 2006.” Only eight states require reporting such data, and there are no federal reporting requirements on the subject, guaranteeing the real number is higher. Several former abortion industry insiders and policy scholars have told Congress or admitted under oath that infanticide after failed abortions happens beyond the notice of official numbers.

Infanticide is technically illegal nationwide under the under the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002. However, BAIPA “did not directly create civil or criminal penalties,” as admitted by a 2019 PolitiFact article (which nevertheless gave Trump a “False” rating on the subject, which LifeSiteNews dissected at the time). That law was “toothless and purely symbolic,” the article quoted University of Massachusetts law professor and Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund member Dwight Duncan as saying.

Yet for at least the past decade, congressional Democrats have consistently voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would mandate basic medical care for abortion-surviving newborns with penalties that existing law lacks. As of September 2024, only 18 states have laws requiring medical care for infants delivered alive after attempted abortions, according to FRC, leaving abortionists free to commit infanticide in a majority of the country.