05-03-2025
Missouri's ‘born alive' legislation is not what you think. It's worse
The Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City (Tessa Weinberg/Missouri Independent).
Missouri legislators are once again pushing what they refer to as 'Born Alive Survivors Act,' a bill that feeds off myths and miseducation about abortion in order to punish people navigating a tragic fetal diagnosis.
It targets a specific circumstance in a pregnancy involving the diagnosis of a fetus as 'incompatible with life — three horrific words families never want to hear from specialists.
If the bill passes, the law would target an even more specific subset of people who face this heartbreaking scenario — those who choose to induce labor before their due date to end their pregnancies and say goodbye to their baby under neonatal hospice care in order to begin the process of healing and grieving.
These bills deprive families of a birth plan for dying that would allow them privacy and comfort care in the last precious moments of their baby's life instead of fruitless interventions they do not want. For some patients, this course of care, sometimes called therapeutic induction of early labor, allows them to close an unthinkably difficult chapter on their own terms.
Supporters of 'born alive' legislation want to ban comfort care in these circumstances and instead force aggressive interventions with no evidence that they would sustain life.
While ending a pregnancy that is incompatible with life falls under the technical definition of abortion, it might not be the kind of abortion story we're accustomed to hearing about.
Take for example the experience of Chrissy Tiegen, who first described her loss as 'a miscarriage' at 20 weeks of pregnancy. Later, she realized she had had an abortion in the medical and legal sense because providers induced with medication. Her doctors knew her pregnancy was non-viable, and her own health was quickly failing.
Abortion was life-saving and her initial confusion over terminology is common and frankly wouldn't matter if anti-abortion politicians weren't twisting situations like hers for political gain.
What anti-abortion politicians want you to believe in their 'born-alive' rhetoric is that they're addressing something that does not happen in modern day abortion care — accidental failed abortions that result in live births.
In truth, they want people to stay pregnant on the government's timeline, even as their pregnancies grow riskier to their health. Those who choose to stay pregnant will be left unpunished under this proposed law. Those who end their nonviable pregnancies with safe medical intervention will be separated from their newborn and providers will be forced to apply aggressive, futile medical interventions.
These bills were never about concern for a baby's life. If they were, they would not apply punishment to one set of families who face the same tragic outcomes as others. It's about punishing people for exercising their bodily autonomy. It's about politicians wrestling for control over our bodies. It's about placing ideologically driven timelines on pregnancy.
When you hear about 'born-alive' bills, don't take the bait.
This isn't about abortion or life. It's about the government's obsession with punishment and control over pregnant people. Our steadily increasing maternal mortality rates tell the real story. And it's about the hypocrisy and cruelty of anti-abortion policies and the people who uphold them.
