No, Tim Walz Did Not Legalize Infanticide

Just a warning to my readers who have suffered trauma from infant loss or a stillbirth: I’m going to talk about abortion and dead babies in today’s post, so take care of yourself if that would be triggering.

I had a run-in with a pro-life troll on X/Twitter again.

This still happens from time to time, even though I’m liberal with the block button these days. And the encounter reminded me why, even though I can’t agree with pro-choice people either, I keep saying that the pro-life movement is a confidence game.

This all started when I shared a meme about vice presidential candidate Governor Tim Walz.

The pro-lifer informed me that Walz “endorses infanticide.”

I informed him that that wasn’t true, because it’s not.

He showed me an article about Walz’s changing the wording of a 1976 Minnesota statue stating that an infant born alive during an abortion was a human person, and requiring requiring doctors to use “all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice” to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.” The new legislation that Walz signed in 2023, gets rid of the words “a live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person” and had the law just say “an infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person,” thus including every infant born alive whether there was an abortion involved or not. It also replaces “to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant” with the words, “to care for the infant who is born alive.”

The pro-lifer fervently informed me that Walz’s update to the wording meant that babies were going to be murdered if they were born alive in a botched abortion attempt, which was infanticide, so there. He’d legalized infanticide.

I explained that that’ s not  what Walz did at all.

The reason lawmakers like Walz are changing the wording in laws about medical care for all babies born alive, is that badly worded laws can have painful unintended consequences if a baby is born with a terminal medical condition. Sometimes, those laws are used to demand that you can’t provide comfort care for a dying baby, but you have to do everything in your power to resuscitate them and eke out their lives to the very last possible minute. This can be catastrophic for a family that’s already going through unbearable grief. Think about it. If you were pregnant and nearly full term, but you found out that the baby was only going to be able to live for a few minutes after birth, which would you want? Would you want the doctor to deliver the baby in the safest way possible, wrap her in a blanket, and give her to you so you  could hold her, baptize her, sing her a lullaby, take some family pictures and make the few moments of her life comfortable? Or would you like to watch as the baby is given CPR until her ribs break even though it will do no good? That’s an actual situation that some parents and doctors have to face. A baby being born alive during a late term abortion isn’t.

And just in case you didn’t know, the Catholic Church is absolutely fine with declining painful interventions that will probably be ineffective to stretch out a life that’s coming to an end– whether that life has lasted 99 years or just a few months in the womb and a few minutes outside it. Comfort care and hospice care are not killing. You can have a “do not resuscitate” for a dying elderly relative. You can take a dying person off the ventilator and let them rest in peace. And you can plan similar measures for a dying baby. Would to God that no one was ever in that situation, but since they sometimes are, they shouldn’t be terrorized by telling them that comfort care is infanticide. It’s not.

This doesn’t mean that abortion is right; it has no bearing on whether it’s right or wrong. It doesn’t mean that you have to vote for Harris and Walz or that you have to vote against them– remember, I’ve been saying for weeks that there simply isn’t a “Catholic” political party, but it’s not a sin to vote your conscience and make a choice for who you honestly think would do the least harm. We can disagree and argue about that. But lying is a sin, and it’s immoral to spread lies when you realize you’ve been mistaken. The Democratic party simply does not support infanticide. No one does. Walz did not sign a law legalizing infanticide. Infanticide is murder and remains illegal in all fifty states, as it ought to be. Cast your vote based on something else.

I said words to this effect to the pro-lifer on Twitter, and he blew his stack.

“I’m not going to read all that,” he insisted. He went on to call me a Nazi and some other choice names.

Other people got on the thread to try to coax him to scroll up and read the few paragraphs of explanation, but he refused and called them Nazis as well.

I admonished him that calumny was a mortal sin, and muted the thread, and moved on.

Was this person a troll just trying to make trouble? Sure. But I think he believed what he was saying. And he refused to consider that the outlandish things he was saying were wrong.

And this is yet another example of why I’m done with the pro-life movement.

I think that killing is wrong, from the first to the last moments of a person’s life, but I’m finished with the pro-life movement. The pro-life movement has consistently shown that they are not about protecting life from its first to its last moment. They are about spreading lies and mass hysteria in order to get Republicans elected, that’s all. Any attempt to seek the truth when one of their lies is brought up is shouted down by calling the truth-seeker a baby killer. They don’t actually want to be educated about pregnancy, obstetrics and end-of-life issues so they can form an ethical stance on every situation that comes up. They just want to sling mud.

I won’t take part in that anymore.

I actually want to help people and defend life.

Maybe alone in that, but there you have it. I want to help people and defend life, therefore I’m done with the pro-life movement.

Let’s all try to make it a better world.