Jezebel: Montana Voters Are Facing a Deceptive Abortion Ballot Measure
Last year, Montana resident Lea Bossler experienced pregnancy complications that meant she had to give birth at 25 weeks. Her newborn daughter was diagnosed with fetal inflammatory response syndrome, and when Bossler and her husband learned she wouldn’t survive, they chose to say goodbye.
An initiative on the Montana ballot next month would take that choice away from couples like Bossler and her husband. LR-131 (aka the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act”) would target and criminalize doctors for not providing “life-saving care” to the newborn—even when no amount of action from doctors could realistically keep the baby alive, and families just want to be with their dying infant in its final moments.
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The measure is the product of “years of anti-abortion fearmongering,” Hillary-Anne Crosby, an organizer working on the campaign to oppose the measure, told Jezebel. Under the initiative, doctors who fail to provide life-saving medical care to any infants born after “natural or induced labor, cesarean section, induced abortion, or another method” would face up to 20 years in prison and $50,000 in fines. Republican state Rep. Matt Regier, one of the architects of the measure, has claimed its purpose is to protect infant “survivors” of abortion. But the actual outcome would be harm to families like Bossler’s. Scenarios about hypothetical babies “living” through abortions—like what Regier describes when promoting the ballot measure—simply don’t happen.
“Montanans are being told they’re voting on a measure that’s just going to ‘protect infants born as a result of an abortion,’ but what they’re actually voting on is forcing care on nonviable infants...when families otherwise would have received spiritual comfort and palliative care,” Crosby said.
Families suffering from the loss of a child shouldn’t be subject to criminalization, surveillance, and state investigation on top of their pain, Crosby added.