Business Before the Senate

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, on an entirely different matter, this week the Senate will resume our work in the personnel business by considering yet another of President Trump's qualified judicial nominees.

Eric Miller has been chosen to sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and one look at his legal career to this point says he is well prepared to do so.

Mr. Miller is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he served on the Law Review editorial staff. He has held prominent clerkships on both the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. His record of public service at the Justice Department and in private practice reflects a legal mind of the highest caliber.

I hope each of my colleagues will join me in voting to advance the first circuit court nominee of this new Congress. That will be 31 since President Trump took office. But first, in just a few hours, the Senate will vote on advancing a straightforward piece of legislation to protect newborn babies. This legislation is simple. It would simply require that medical professionals give the same standard of care and medical treatment to newborn babies who have survived an attempted abortion as any other newborn baby would receive in any other circumstance. It isn't about new restrictions on abortion. It isn't about changing the options available to women. It is just about recognizing that a newborn baby is a newborn baby, period.

This bill would make clear that in the year 2019, in the United States of America, medical professionals on hand when a baby is born alive need to maintain their basic ethical and professional responsibilities to that newborn. It would make sure our laws reflect the fact that the human rights of newborn boys and girls are innate; they don't come and go based on the circumstances of birth. Whatever the circumstances, if that medical professional comes face-to-face with a baby who has been born alive, they are looking at a human being with human rights, period.

To be frank, it makes me uneasy that such a basic statement seems to be generating actual disagreement. Can the extreme, far-left politics surrounding abortion really have come this far? Are we really supposed to think that it is normal that there are now two sides debating whether newborn, living babies deserve medical attention?

We already know that many of our Democratic colleagues want the United States to remain one of seven nations in the world that permit elective abortions after 20 weeks--seven countries, including North Korea, China, and the United States of America. But now it seems the far left wants to push the envelope even further. Apart from the entire abortion debate, they now seem to be suggesting that newborn babies' right to life may be contingent--contingent--on the circumstances surrounding their birth. Well, evidently, the far left is no longer convinced that all babies are created equal, but the rest of us are still pretty fond of that principle.

My colleagues across the aisle need to decide where they will take their cues on these moral questions. On the one hand, there are a few extreme voices who have decided that some newborn lives are more disposable than others. On the other side is the entire rest of the country.

I would urge my colleagues: Let's listen to the voices of the American people. Let's reaffirm that when we say every life is created equal, we actually mean it. Let's vote to advance the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act later today.

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