This is the article that appeared in the November 2024 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release, here.
In the vice presidential debate, Senator J.D. Vance accused Minnesota Governor Tim Walz of signing a bill that allows for infanticide. He said, “as I read the Minnesota law that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion, where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”
Walz accused Vance of distorting the law, saying, “That is not the way the law is written.”
Walz lied. That is exactly the way the law is written.
In 1976, Minnesota passed a law that required medical personnel to “preserve the life and the health of the child” who was born as a result of an abortion.
In 2023, Walz signed a law that amended this law to read that in such cases all that is needed is to “care for the infant who is born alive.” Stricken was the requirement to “preserve the life and the health of the child.”
Vance was right to say that in these cases “the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care.”
Now why did Walz remove the requirement that medical personnel “preserve the life and the health of the child,” replacing it with the much lower standard of merely providing “care for an infant who is born alive”? Keeping him warm is not sufficient.
Vance said that what Walz did was “fundamentally barbaric.” We agree.
