Horrifying California Bill Would Radically Change What Happens When an Abortion Causes the Death of a Newborn

By Isa Cox April 3, 2022

Legislation has been introduced in California that could effectively legalize all abortions as well as infanticide for newborn babies seemingly up to weeks after their birth.

California’s AB 2223 would remove a current requirement in state law that county coroners hold inquests to investigate “the circumstances, manner, and cause of violent, sudden, or unusual deaths” from covering deaths “following known or suspected self-induced or criminal abortion.”

The law currently also refers to the individual who bears a child as a “woman.”

No more of this parochial nonsense for California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to create an “abortion sanctuary!”

The bill would “delete the requirement that a coroner hold inquests for deaths related to or following known or suspected self-induced or criminal abortion” as well as requirements “that an unattended fetal death be handled as a death without medical attendance” and would “prohibit using the coroner’s statements on the certificate of fetal death to establish, bring, or support a criminal prosecution or civil cause of damages against any person.”

The legislation replaces the word “woman” with “individual” or “pregnant person” — one who has a “fundamental right to choose to bear a child or to choose to have and to obtain an abortion, except as specifically permitted by this article.”

However, even more disturbing than protections for the doubly erroneous “fundamental rights of pregnant persons” to destroy children in the womb is wording that seemingly protects individuals involved in the deaths of “perinatal babies” from civil and criminal liability.

“Notwithstanding any other law, a person shall not be subject to civil or criminal liability or penalty, or otherwise deprived of their rights, based on their actions or omissions with respect to their pregnancy or actual, potential, or alleged pregnancy outcome, including miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death,” the proposed amendment reads.

“Perinatal,” meaning around the time of birth, can pertain to the period of time after babies are born, and most certainly the gestational period right up until they are born, when they are in most cases fully viable outside the womb.

Do you think California lawmakers will pass this bill?

As Thomas More Society Counsel Charles LiMandri told the pro-life website LifeSiteNews, this appears to be paving the way for the “brutal murder” of newborn babies, possibly up to several weeks old.

The proposed legislation, LiMandri said, “exposes the false narrative that the abortion lobby has been peddling for over half a century: That no one knows when life begins, and babies in their mothers’ wombs feel no pain,” LiMandri said.

“No sane person can deny that a newborn infant is a fully developed human being, one that is capable of feeling intense pain. Yet, by including ‘perinatal’ in its provisions, [the bill] would authorize the brutal murder of these infants even after they are born,” he said.

LiMandri and LifeSiteNews both cited the medical website MedicineNet’s definition of “perinatal,” which states that the “perinatal period is defined in diverse ways. Depending on the definition, it starts at the 20th to 28th week of gestation and ends 1 to 4 weeks after birth.”

PubMed.gov, which is maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, defines this period as, “broadly defined,” encompassing “the time frame from … 18 to 24 months after the birth of the child.”

Months.

As LiMandri pointed out, this bill capitalizes deviously on the longstanding legal fallacy that the definition of a human being fluctuates along an intersection of the child’s gestational age, viability outside the womb, and the mother’s desire to or confidence level in bringing the child into the world.

But there is no fundamental right to destroy the life of another human being, and no other sound definition for all those of God’s creatures who do have the fundamental right to life beyond the miraculously conceived human form in the womb.

This proposed legislation is quintessential to, and the natural conclusion of, the broader movement behind it to emphatically protect any and all forms of abortion, at any age, for whatever reason, regardless of any other factor than whether or not the mother (or the malicious actors pressuring her) desire the child to be born.

Introduced by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Berkeley Democrat, the bill has a distance to go through the legislative process. It is scheduled to be discussed by the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

But Americans who care about the sanctity of life need to pay attention to it now.

Just as this bill’s language seeks to erase all women by striking the mention of the feminine form from its text, abortion seeks to even the playing field between men and women through the death of the children that only women can bear.

This isn’t just female erasure — it’s the erasure of God’s signature on the created, and protected, human form, which was made male and female, whose life begins in the womb.

These are dark days for our country. We must pray fervently that the radical nature of such legislation is shocking people into the reality of just how depraved our moral guidelines have become.