PITTSBURGH — At a signing ceremony here Aug. 5, President George Bush has signed a law that protects children who are born “accidentally” during a late-term abortion. They are often left to die.

With Gianna Jessen, who survived an attempted saline abortion in 1977, witnessing the event, the president gave meaning to the signing of a bill that might have otherwise been quietly lost in the slew of legislation passed during marathon Capitol Hill sessions before the August recess.

The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act passed on July 18 at night with no debate in the Senate, by unanimous consent. In the House it passed by voice vote in March.

At the signing ceremony for the new law, Bush connected it to the pro-life movement. “Today, through sonograms and other technology, we can see clearly that unborn children are members of the human family,” he said. “They reflect our image, and they are created in God's own image. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is a step toward the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.”

Douglas Johnson, National Right to Life Committee legislative director, said the measure is very much a part of the pro-life movement's agenda. “Some newborn infants, especially those who are born alive during abortions, have been treated as non-persons,” he said. The Born-Alive Act “says that every infant born alive, even during an abortion and even if premature, is a full legal person under federal law.”

The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was first introduced in the House by now-retired Congressman Charles Canady, RFla., passing the House 380-15 in September 2000. The Senate subsequently killed it by an anonymous objection before the 2000 session ended.

It was reintroduced this session by Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, and Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.

The Born-Alive Act marks the first pro-life bill that has made it to the Senate floor since Democrats took control in May of last year when Vermont senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party.

The legislation is simple. It protects every baby who survives an abortion attempt, covering cases where there is a “complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother” of a baby who “breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section or induced abortion.”

‘Live-Birth Abortion’

The legislation was largely triggered as a consequence of the efforts of whistleblower Jill Stanek, a nurse who was fired in September 2001 from Christ Hospital and Medical Center in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, Ill., two years after she drew attention to the practice of what has become known as “live-birth abortion.” In such cases, children are delivered and purposely left unattended to die following a botched abortion even though it is clear the baby is very much alive.

Stanek was also present at Bush's signing of the bill Aug. 5.

In congressional testimony last year, Stanek told gruesome stories of babies purposely left to die. “One night,” she recalled, “a nursing coworker was taking an aborted Down-syndrome baby who was born alive to our soiled utility room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him.

“I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a soiled utility room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived,” Stanek said. “He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about half a pound and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I couldn't tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall.”

Stanek's chilling testimony made it near-to-impossible, even for abortion advocates, to oppose the Born-Alive Act. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat and member of the House Judiciary Committee, supported and spoke in favor of it, despite describing himself as being “as pro-choice as anybody on earth.”

Still, some pro-abortion advocates are on record opposing it. When the bill was first introduced in 2000, the National Abortion Rights Action League said the bill “would inappropriately inject prosecutors and lawmakers into the medical decision-making process” and “effectively grant legal personhood to a previable fetus ‘in direct conflict with Roe.’”

Helen Alvare, then serving as a spokeswoman with the U.S. bishops’ conference, observed at the time, “The pro-life community predicted that failure to stop partial-birth abortion would lead to infanticide. Now, NARAL is arguing for precisely that.”

This time around, NARAL stayed largely silent about the bill. One concession to pro-abortion activists, which made it possible for many Democrats and moderate Republicans to support the bill, was a move by House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., to remove the findings of fact from the bill that stated the events Stanek reported upon.

Hadley Arkes, the Princeton professor formerly of Amherst College who first came up with the concept for the bill, calls the removal of the findings by committee Republicans an unfortunate “cave-in.”

The bill, Arkes stressed, means “that the child marked for an abortion but born alive has a claim to the protection of the law, and that claim cannot pivot on the question of whether anyone wanted her.” In other words, it states that the constitutional “right to abortion” first set forth in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wadedoes not establish an absolute right to kill a child even after it is alive outside the mother's womb.

Arkes said the bill is the “most modest first step imaginable on the issue of abortion,” but pro-lifers believe it is a key one. Senate sponsor Rick Santorum wrote in his weekly press column, “The fact that neither chamber needed a roll-call vote to determine the legitimacy of born-alive infant protection but decided unanimously to pass a law establishing such protection is significant.

“It underscores the popular understanding that the life of a unique human being is indisputable and should be safeguarded, regardless of its stage of development,” he said.

Santorum added: “Upon the president's signature, there will be no legal distinction between a 50-year-old, a 15-year-old, a 5-year-old or a 5-minute-old. Between them, their worth as individual people should bear no distinction, either.”

Bush cited Pope John Paul II at the signing ceremony when he called the law “a step toward the day when the promises of the Declaration of Independence will apply to everyone, not just those with the voice and power to defend their rights. This law is a step toward the day when America fully becomes, in the words of Pope John Paul II, ‘a hospitable, a welcoming culture.’”

Kathryn Jean Lopez is executive editor of National Review Online.