The House recently passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act which requires that babies who survive an abortion attempt are to be cared for as though they’d been born more normally. The Act opens with these two paragraphs:

Sec. 2. Findings

Congress finds as follows:

(1) If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws.

(2) Any infant born alive after an abortion or within a hospital, clinic, or other facility has the same claim to the protection of the law that would arise for any newborn, or for any person who comes to a hospital, clinic, or other facility for screening and treatment or otherwise becomes a patient within its care.

President Barack Obama has said he’ll veto this bill that protects babies newly born under a procedure that was intended to have a different outcome. His…rationale…is this:

HR 3504 [Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act] would impose new legal requirements related to the provision of abortion services in certain circumstances, which would likely have a chilling effect, reducing access to care.

If the President were presented with HR 3134 [Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015] or HR 3504, he would veto them.

This is nonsense. The Born-Alive bill has nothing to do with abortion, per se, only with its aftermath. The abortion ended with the removal of the baby from the mother’s womb. The task now is to care for a newly born baby. That this particular baby was born via a procedure that is not one of the more normal birthing procedures is wholly irrelevant to that.

Of course, Obama knows that. His decision—in advance of seeing the bill actually passed—to veto a bill that explicitly protects the life of a newly born infant, and the silence of his fellow Democrats on his veto threat, says volumes about the Democratic Party’s policy toward new-born babies.