Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Part I

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Tim Walz Legalized Infanticide in Minnesota: Christians Must Reckon With Minnesota’s Revised Born Alive Statute

We are looking at an absolute clash of worldviews in the 2024 presidential election. We knew that already, but the issues are becoming ever more clear, even if on the Democratic side there is a deep resistance to defining the issues at all. As of now, what we know about the Harris campaign, it’s basically coming out as we think of positions and principles and policies. It is simply coming out in very small quantities. And even as writers for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others have noted, at this point you have a Democratic nominee for president of the United States who appears to be very resistant to being very honest about her positions on the issues. Now, that’s not going to last even as the mainstream media are complicit in trying to help her make that last.

A part of the reason it’s not lasting the way the Democrats want it to last is because of the fact that there’s a vice presidential nominee on the ticket as well and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is extremely well known on many of these issues. The big story there is not just his liberalism. The big story there is his progressive ideology that has come out in terms of his leadership after his party gained a majority in the legislature and thus he had a more or less full rank. He had been at least presenting himself as something more “moderate,” put that term in quotation marks, before he gained a legislative majority. And then he’s turned to Minnesota into a laboratory, which quite frankly, even as you compare it to a state like California, is really way on the left. And one of the things we saw is that once the Dobbs decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, Governor Walz signed into law legislation that really amounts to, I don’t know that I can say the most radical abortion law in the United States, I can simply say it’s hard to imagine any law on abortion that would be as radical or more radical. And that’s because the law that Governor Walz signed into effect has basically no barrier on abortion at any time. There is no reference to, say, weeks or months of fetal development. It is just an unqualified, indeed as stated in the legislation, It’s claimed to be a fundamental right to an abortion. And of course, it’s a person’s right as people are saying these days, because the transgender revolution has to be thrown in here as well.

And as the progressive left pushes on this, you recognize that there is also nothing in the Minnesota law that would put any restriction on, say, a minor child, a girl in terms of seeking abortion without any cooperation, any supervision, any authorization, or even any knowledge on the part of her parents.

You really are at an incredibly liberal law and there have been those who have simply pointed out the obvious fact. Let’s just think about this for a moment. Abortion is categorically wrong. Human life is sacred from the moment of fertilization until natural death. Intervention to bring about the death of a human being at any point from fertilization until natural death in terms of something like abortion, it’s absolutely a form of homicide. From the Christian worldview, the biblical worldview, it is a grotesque, murderous violation of human dignity.

And as we’re thinking about that, let’s just step back for a moment and recognize once again what I said about the law. I reported this just even as Governor Walz was announced as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. And that is that the claim in the Minnesota legislation which he championed and signed quite publicly as a celebration. It’s not just a comprehensive fundamental right to an abortion; it is also abortion at every point in the pregnancy. And thus, we’re in territory way beyond what the Biden-Harris argument had been. I think dishonestly had been, which is what they want to do is to legislate Roe. No, this is way past Roe.

Here’s the other thing. As you look at the development of the unborn child during pregnancy, this means that there is no legislative, no legal sanction on any abortion in the state of Minnesota right up until the moment of birth. Now, that’s not just a generalization; it’s a strategic purpose of the law. You look at the law, you recognize it intentionally references no point at which the state of Minnesota, according to this legislation, there is nothing that would allow any kind of limitation on abortion for any reason all the way up until the moment of what’s declared to be a live birth. But at that point, we need to recognize the legislation, and this is going to stretch your imagination, is actually more radical than that.

Charles Camosy, who is a Professor of Medical Humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine, he is also a moral theology fellow at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York. He has written an article for the journal, First Things, in which he makes very clear that the Democratic vice presidential nominee actually supports the right to infanticide. Now, he has documented this. He has proved his case absolutely. I want to be very clear in referencing the actual text of the legislation as it was adopted in the state of Minnesota. And what we need to note is that, in that legislation, it’s not just the words that are remaining. It’s the words that were taken out. And the words that were taken out include the word abortion. The original texts of the law, this would be Minnesota Statute 2022, this would be section 56, and it’s subdivision one, recognition medical care.

The text states, “The born alive infant as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.” A lot of words there. That’s what used to be the statutory language. This is the statutory language as a result of the action of the legislature as signed into law by Governor Tim Walsh. Now, the word abortion is taken out. Indeed, the words as a result of abortion stricken out. And at the end of the language, the words “to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant” taken out. And instead, it simply says now “to care for the infant who is born alive.”

Now we need to notice what has happened there. What has happened is that the statutory language requiring medical personnel to seek to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant, that’s now taken out. And so there is no statutory requirement that there be an effort to preserve the life and health of the infant. And, of course, this would include infants who are born alive in the course of an abortion. Authorities there in the state of Minnesota very helpfully have made clear, because the records are kept, that there have been infants born alive in late-term abortion in the state of Minnesota and thus Governor Walz–and this cannot be by accident this can only be by intention, remember, this is an intentional change in the language–the governor signed into law a statutory form that simply says that care must be extended to any infant born alive. It doesn’t define that care and what’s most morally important is that the imperative of seeking to save the infant’s life is entirely removed.

Professor Camosy writing at First Things says, “Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has picked Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. Walz recently legalized infanticide in the state of Minnesota.” He went on to say that the threat is all too real. “And by infanticide I really do mean aiming at the death of newborn infants.” Now, my guess is that a lot of Christians, a lot of listeners listening to me today think that this would be nearly impossible in any civilized society. Indeed, it should be impossible, unthinkable, far beyond the moral pale. And furthermore, even when it comes to at least many people, we would assume, who are thinking in muddled ways about abortion, you would think that at least they’d be clear about this.

You would think actually that this would be a catalyst for helping them, if not forcing them, to think more carefully about the reality of abortion, but the fact is that we’re also talking here about the state of Minnesota. And even though there’s clearly a scandal here in the legislation, I want to say I think there’s a scandal in the fact that Americans have not known about this. And the greater scandal is that those who did know about it evidently weren’t too concerned about it or at least that’s true for many. No doubt, there are many pro-life activists who’ve known about it and been greatly concerned about it. But as for the American people blissfully unaware, that does not mean without moral responsibility.

Now, Professor Camosy very rightly points to the fact that infanticide was directly addressed by the early Christian Church in categorical terms. Even as previous to the Christian influence, the Roman Empire had been quite open to infanticide, both in terms of practice and at least some policy. The reality is that Christianity brought a moral transformation and it’s also true, as Professor Camosy makes clear, that in the modern day there are some who are seeking to reverse this in a secular age. They’re seeking to reverse not only the legal statements, but they’re seeking to reverse the moral instinct when it comes to revulsion against infanticide. There are some modern medical ethicists, as hard as this is for many people to believe, who actually openly endorse infanticide as a moral option. Again, what that means is the deliberate killing of a human infant.

Seeking to explain the meaning of the Minnesota legislation, Professor Camosy writes that all this “brings us to Tim Walz, now the Democratic nominee for vice president and his legalization of infanticide in Minnesota.” He goes on, “In 2023, Walz supported an omnibus health bill that radically changed his state’s abortion law. This health bill, in a callback to the ancient practice of abandoning newborns, intentionally and explicitly legalized the denial of life-saving medical care to infants born alive after botched abortions. State law,” says the professor, “used to explicitly protect these babies, but Walz and his supporters changed it, insisting that references to abortion be removed and that medical care be changed to mere care.”

“In addition,” he writes, “while the original law required medical care personel to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant, the Walz-supported change struck that whole line.” It now requires medical personnel merely “to care for the infant who is born alive.” The goal and substance of that care absolutely not defined. Now, keep this in mind as you understand that the great media strategy is to present Governor Walz as America’s dad. I’m going to return to that theme in another edition of The Briefing, because I want to point out the Democrats have tried this before. But just think of the dark, the macabre, the dishonest, the horrifying reality of referring to someone as America’s dad, while at the same time recognizing that he signed into law legislation which allows infanticide. This is the weird thing, it’s the frightening thing, the absolutely horrifying thing about our age.

You have someone who can be presented as so avuncular, so energetic, so positive. Remember, he’s the one who said the Democratic ticket was going to bring back the joy. But when you’re talking about joy and then you talk about infanticide, you recognize that something fundamental has gone wrong here. There is a basic dishonesty here that covers an even more basic evil, a fundamental evil. Again, just to clarify, the term infanticide means any action, positive or negative. This could mean also just declining to extend care. The Christian worldview would say that’s equally morally culpable as a direct act, either directly or indirectly, acting or not acting, so as to bring about the goal of the death of the infant. That’s what infanticide is.

Even as we think about infanticide in terms of the state of Minnesota here and the moral responsibility of its governor, Tim Walz, in signing that into law, we also need to recognize that when we are looking at this issue, it’s not limited to this governor. It’s not limited to this state. This is going to have to prompt an investigation on the part of Christian citizens. You would like to think at least just morally sensitive, morally aware citizens in states to consider what the law is in their own state. But again, this goes back to the basic radicalism of the law signed into effect after Dobbs by Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.

The issue here is the moral status of babies in this case born alive.

Part II

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Hospitals Aren’t Taking Action to Save Very Premature Babies? Investigative Report from The Wall Street Journal Shows Some Medical Centers Refuse Life-Saving Care to Babies

But there’s another context in which the sanctity and dignity of babies born even early premature babies. It is also a matter of grave and important urgency, moral consequence for Christians, and that’s why we need to look at a major report. It’s a major investigative study published in The Wall Street Journal just in recent days. The reporter is Liz Essley Whyte. The headline is this, “Doctors Can Now Save Very Premature Babies. Most Hospitals Don’t Try.” Okay, how’s that for shocking? And in this case, we’re talking about The Wall Street Journal, an authoritative newspaper in the secular media with a vast reach and influence and a very highly trained investigative staff.

Doctors can now say very premature babies. Most hospitals don’t try. The subhead is this, “Babies born 22 weeks into pregnancy have increasingly better odds of survival, but parents often don’t know what’s possible.” Okay, the bottom line in this article is that medical technology would now allow the saving of the lives of many premature babies born at points that would previously have been outside the reach of any medical care. The reality is that medical care that now could make a difference in saving a premature infant’s life, in many cases, it’s not being extended. Parents don’t even know that the technology might be available and hospitals and medical centers are simply allowing infants to die, deliberately not deploying this kind of treatment.

Now, as you read the report, you understand there’s some hospitals that will be ill-equipped for this kind of treatment. A baby’s born very prematurely, they simply don’t have it, they may like the technology, they may like the personnel in some ways, but that does not explain what is declared in this headline, “Most Hospitals Don’t Try.” The article begins by going to a mom whose baby was born at 22 weeks into her pregnancy, as Liz Essley Whyte says, just passed the halfway mark. Then she writes, “Doctors at Methodist Hospital in suburban Minneapolis,” don’t forget this is suburban Minneapolis, “said they couldn’t save such a premature baby and that no hospital could. They told her that once the baby girl was born, the mom could hold her until the infant died, but this mom didn’t want to give up.” She checked out, we are told, of one hospital and she went to a birthing center which we are told was connected to Children’s Minnesota Hospital. It’s just seven miles away, by the way, but an entire moral universe away in this effect.

The mom did give birth there and doctors “immediately intubated the baby to help her breathe and placed her in an incubator.” The precious little girl is now four years old and is healthy and “has surpassed all the developmental milestones for her age.” Dr. Thomas George, who directs the Children’s Minnesota neonatal intensive care unit, said that the precious little four-year-old, she’s doing wonderfully well. And this is when Liz Essley Whyte tells us, “Medical advances over the past several decades have given hospitals the ability to save younger and younger premature newborns, yet most hospitals don’t try and parents often aren’t aware of what’s possible or that other hospitals even just a few miles away might offer their newborns a fighting chance.”

The next paragraph is also absolutely crucial. “Doctors are now capable of saving the lives of babies born at 22 weeks and, in rare cases, a week earlier, with improved techniques to help tiny lungs develop and protect fragile skin and organs. Hospitals with extensive experience resuscitating extremely premature babies report survival rates as high as 67% for babies born at 22 weeks.” Okay, so even if some hospitals aren’t equipped with the technology or the personnel to save babies at this stage of gestation, why, where the technology and the personnel are available, are these hospitals not taking action? Well, in some cases it is simply willful. Many of these hospitals just don’t want to get into this particular area of neonatal medical care. They do not want to spend the resources in order to try to save these babies at this stage of pregnancy.

Liz Essley Whyte writes, “Some US hospitals aren’t sufficiently equipped or capable of pulling off the new advances. Others have chosen not to offer the care, saying it is likely to fail, is expensive, typically more than $100,000 a child and sometimes so much more, and subjects tiny fragile infants to needless pain and the risk of long-term disabilities.” Instead, she writes hauntingly, “They often provide comfort care, wrapping the newborn in a blanket, placing it on the mother’s chest, and sometimes giving medicines to ease the child’s final moments.” Now, how many babies are we talking about here? How many babies are we talking about who would be born somewhere between, say, 22 and 24 weeks gestation in the US each year? This reporter tells us that it’s roughly 8,000 infants a year. That’s a lot. 8,000 infants. That’s 8,000 human beings a year. Reporter Whyte also gives us an insight into what, among medical personnel, is often referred to as a gray zone. That would be somewhere between 20 and 25 weeks. As she explains, doctors “agree that babies born at 25 or 26 weeks can and should be treated as long as they don’t have other complications, while those born at 20 weeks or less are too small to save.”

Now, here’s something I want us to think about. You have a situation here in which just a matter of a few years ago, it wouldn’t be possible to save the babies who could be saved, now. Just a couple of decades before that, it would’ve been unthinkable that they could save the babies they were saving a matter of, say, a decade ago. Liz Essley Whyte, by the way, very rightly points to the death of a premature baby boy born to Jacqueline Kennedy when President Kennedy was in the White House. The fact that medical personnel then basically knew nothing of what is now known, lack the technologies that we now have, even at, say, just a basic hospital when it comes to premature birth. So this really is a modern revolution in medicine. And by the way, it’s like every other revolution in medicine connected to every other revolution in medicine.

Here, you’re talking about lung development in particular is one of the grave problems confronted by early premature birth. Lung development is just a crucial issue there, but we also come to understand that treatments that will be relevant for these very early term babies in terms of recent medical developments, they have applications in many cases to others, and that’s just the way medicine works. And so there’s something more going on here than just a question of technology and personnel, even just a question of policy.

Speaking of pushing the limits back, the article cites Dr. Edward Bell, a neonatologist at University of Iowa Hospital who said, “Through my career of more than 40 years now, we’ve seen the limit of viability move about a week every 10 years. We’ve done what we thought was never going to be biologically possible.” So this is very good news. The technology here, very good news. And we have every expectation that there will be a pushing back on the term of pregnancy such that at earlier and earlier points of development, you can have babies saved. There are also just horrifying realities revealed in this investigative report. For one thing, in some medical centers, you are having doctors refuse to extend this kind of care even if the baby is just, say, three or four days outside of the envelope. And then comes the admission. I’m so thankful for this in the article that even dating this in terms of days and weeks in the development of a pregnancy, it’s an inexact thing to begin with.

Just ask any number of moms.

Part III

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Americans are Confused about the Most Basic Issues of Human Dignity and the Sanctity of Human Life — Christians Must Face the Battle for Life at Every Level

Now, you should take a look at the entire investigative report at The Wall Street Journal, but I want us to step back and just think about something. These two developments came within just a matter of days, both of them rooted in Minnesota. The article in this case begins in Minneapolis. We’re talking about the Minnesota governor as we were talking about infanticide. Now, I’m not saying these are exactly the same thing. I am simply saying that we are living in a society in which Christians have better understand that the sanctity of human life is becoming more and more confused and opaque in the minds of much of the American population. Many Americans, obviously, are not thinking clearly about this. And in some cases, it comes with a financial issue such as insurance companies, medical centers. It also comes with a technological series of questions. It comes with all kinds of questions about legal liability and all the rest. Just pushing past all of that, it’s a basic confusion at the most fundamental level as we’re thinking about the sanctity of life and the reality of human dignity.

I also want to point out that we understand that the moral character of a people is something that’s in constant motion, is something in constant movement. And you think about the moral character of the American people and you recognize, “Okay, since the Dobbs decision, we have lost just about every battle over abortion, just about every one of them.” Even just in the last few hours, it has been announced that, in the state of Missouri, there’s now going to be a statewide referendum on the question of abortion. It’s going to be also found in Florida and in other states. And the fact is that since Dobbs in 2022, we haven’t won one of them. The American people are nowhere near as pro-life, not only as we thought they were, but as they thought they were. And they’re telling us with their votes, they’re telling us with their actions, and, of course, we’re also looking at what they tell us about this issue as we look at election day coming in November.

For Christians, it’s a reminder that we have battles at every level. We have the first order level of battle, which sometimes comes right down to making a decision, say, at the ballot box or in the voting booth. But it also comes down to paying attention to legislation at the state level as well as the national level. It also comes down to understanding what’s going on at the medical center perhaps right down the street from you. And I would think that Christian parents looking at pregnancy ought to find out what exactly are the policies of the medical centers in the area. As this article in The Wall Street Journal makes clear, it can come with great consequence just as a matter of a few miles. And then at the larger level, we understand we face a greater challenge than we thought in terms of the recovery of a Christian biblical understanding of human life, human dignity, the sacredness of every single human life.

But I do have to come back where we started and say, “Well, let’s just think about the voting booth for a moment. Let’s think about the decision faced by Americans on election day 2024. Let’s think about what we now know about the vice presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota,” and I want to remind you of something. Once you know it, you cannot unknow it.