Blaeser Testifies in Congressional Briefing on Born-Alive Infant Protection Act.

By Cathy Blaeser

Good afternoon.  My name is Cathy Blaeser, and I serve as Co-Executive Director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life.  Organized in 1968, we are the oldest and largest pro-life organization in Minnesota and one of the oldest and largest in the nation.

Our focus from the beginning has been solely on protecting innocent human life from conception to natural death, focused on abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and healthcare rationing.  We’re not a religious organization nor are we a partisan organization.

We have worked over our 56 years to pass common-sense laws that protect women and children from a profit-seeking, largely unregulated abortion industry.  Over those years, we have lowered the number of annual abortions in Minnesota by almost 50%, from a high of just over 19,000 in 1980 to a consistent low of about 10,000 abortions annually between 2012 and 2021.

We did this through common-sense legislation like Parental Notification, Women’s Right to Know, Safe Place for Newborns, protections for viable unborn children, Abortion Reporting Requirements, Positive Alternatives Grant funding, protections for Unborn Victims of Violence, and many other laws.

The 2022 elections gave Governor Tim Walz and the Minnesota democrats a very slim “trifecta.”  They had a four-vote majority in our House of Representatives, 1 vote in our Minnesota Senate, and Tim Walz in the Governor’s Mansion.

They took that slim trifecta and decimated Minnesota’s common-sense abortion laws, giving us not only one of the most extreme abortion laws in the nation, but state-sanctioned infanticide for survivors of abortion and disabled newborn babies.

In Minnesota, through the passage of the PRO Act in January 2023, every individual now has a fundamental right to abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy for any reason and for no reason.  We now have abortion up to birth in our state law, with no protections for women or for babies at any gestational age.

The law doesn’t say “a fundamental right to abortion up to so many weeks or through a given trimester or only in certain cases.”  It is open-ended with no protections for viable babies.  It wiped out our viability protections passed decades ago.  We truly now have abortion up to birth.  There is no one saying that this is not true.  They simply say no one would do that.  Yes, they would.  Yes, they do.

Minnesota has had almost 30 years of robust abortion reporting.  Every abortion facility is required to report their data to the Minnesota Department of Health, which publishes an aggregate report on July 1 of each year.

In 2022, there were 12,175 abortions reported in Minnesota, a 20% increase for the first time in 10 years.  Of those abortions, 294 were done between 20-32 weeks of gestation.  Two hundred ninety-four viable babies. 60% of women in Minnesota abort because they simply don’t want children at this time.  Less than 1% of abortions in Minnesota are due to rape, incest, or threat to the life or physical health of the mother.

Yes, they would abort perfectly healthy viable late-term babies.  And they do.

And now there are absolutely no laws stopping them in Minnesota.

You might ask why we’re talking about 2022 abortion statistics instead of 2023 abortion numbers.

That same slim democrat trifecta that passed and signed the PRO Act also changed our abortion reporting requirements.  They will not report on 2023 abortion statistics until after the election.  “Vote us back in and then … maybe … we’ll tell you what happened because of the abortion laws we repealed, the abortion laws we changed, and the abortion law we passed.”

We do know based on numbers being shared by abortion advocacy groups that we will likely have seen between 15,000 and 18,000 abortions in 2023 in Minnesota.  That will be at least a 25% increase in the number of abortions over the 20% increase we saw in 2022.

Minnesota, because of the extreme pro-abortion absolutism of Governor Tim Walz and his democrat legislative leaders, is headed back to the peak numbers of abortions we saw in 1980.  Legal, but not rare.

In a June 2023 article on Minnesota’s PRO Act in the Sahan Journal, Susan Robinson, a late-term abortionist who has practiced in Kansas and in New Mexico, discusses her previous hesitancy to practice late abortions in Minnesota and how that has now changed due to Minnesota’s passage of the PRO Act.  Prior to the PRO Act, she stated she “would not feel comfortable opening a third-trimester practice in Minnesota.”  Now, she feels “Minnesota would be a good location for a clinic.”

Robinson also says that in late-term pregnancies, often “nothing’s wrong” except that it’s an undesired pregnancy.  Healthy mom, healthy baby.

Yes, they would.  Yes, they do.

Governor Walz and the democrat abortion leadership also repealed and defunded any vestige of real choice for Minnesota women and families.

Minnesota has had a Positive Alternatives grant program in effect for about 15 years that provided a small stream of funding for organizations offering “positive alternatives” to abortion – just 3 million dollars annually, but it provided for car seat programs and parenting classes and continuing education programs and life coaching and fatherhood classes across the state in urban and rural communities.

The 2023 legislature under the leadership of Tim Walz not only defunded the program mid-year, stopping immediately all funding promised to grant recipients mid-stream, but they also repealed the program entirely so that another legislature will have to both re-pass the program itself and then fund it once again.

At the same time, they increased the funding of abortion procedures through medical assistance programs by 20% in 2023 and 20% again in 2024.

Lots of money for abortion.  No money for alternatives.  That’s not choice.  That’s coercion.

Tim Walz and his democrat abortion leadership want one choice and one choice only for the women of Minnesota.  Abortion and only abortion.

No longer are women receiving information from abortion providers on the resources available to them should they choose to have their child.

No longer are they receiving information on adoption services.

No longer are they receiving information on the biological science of fetal development nor on the real health consequences both short term and long term in regards to their reproductive health or their mental health.  Informed consent – our Women’s Right to Know law – was also repealed by the 2023 legislature.

And women are walking into abortion facilities that are not licensed or inspected.  Abortion facilities in Minnesota – which are basically outpatient surgical centers – are exempted from state licensing and inspection.  Legal, but not safe.

Finally, I want to share with you the changes Governor Walz and the democrat abortion trifecta made to our Born-Alive Infant Protection Law, which protected babies born alive as a result of a failed abortion.  Minnesota passed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in 2015, and along with it a requirement to report the number of babies born alive and the treatment provided to them as part of our annual abortion report.

Our Born-alive Infant Protection law, like the federal bill before you in Congress, required medically appropriate life- and health-preserving treatment for these born-alive infants.

Because if a baby is born alive during an abortion, there are quite obviously two patients in the room.  There is a mother and a baby.  A newborn baby.  And both the mother and the newborn baby deserve medically appropriate life- and health-preserving treatment

Our law did not require everything at all costs.  It simply required that any baby born alive during an attempted abortion be given the same treatment any other baby born alive at that gestational age would receive.  Exactly as the federal bill requires.

So if a baby is born alive at 15 weeks, the appropriate treatment is comfort care simply because we do not yet have the technology to save that baby. Yet.

But if a baby is born alive at 24 weeks or 26 weeks or 22 weeks or even 21 weeks, that requires a completely different level of treatment.  We can save those babies.  Babies born prematurely at those ages are saved everyday by our incredible NICU teams and technology.

But the 2023 Minnesota legislature under the leadership of Governor Tim Walz devastated that law.

First of all, they changed “life- and health-preserving care” to just “care,” and in every committee hearing and in the floor debate, “care” was defined as “comfort care” – wrapping the baby in a blanket and setting her aside to die.

Perhaps not execution, but purposeful neglect to cause her death.  Any newborn baby wrapped in a blanket and set aside will die.  Every newborn baby, even the healthiest newborn baby, needs more than just comfort care to survive.

And remember, moments before that baby is born alive, every person in that room is wanting and working to kill her.  They may also have been planning to profit from that baby’s organs and tissue.  There is no one advocating for that baby to live.

The 2023 Minnesota legislature under the leadership of Tim Walz also deleted from our Abortion Reporting Requirements the requirement that abortionists report the number of babies born alive in the course of an abortion and the requirement to report what treatments were given to that born-alive baby.

We know that between 2015 and 2021, with the exception of 2020, there have been 3-5 babies born alive in the course of an abortion each year in Minnesota.

That information will no longer be reported.  They don’t want anyone to know about those babies.  No one in the abortion facility is advocating for that baby’s newborn life.

And now this lowered standard of care applies to every newborn in Minnesota, not just those born during an abortion.

They removed the reference to babies born alive as the result of an abortion and simply replaced it with “any infant who is born alive,” with no reference to abortion anywhere in the law.

Every baby born alive in Minnesota is now only guaranteed comfort care, not medically appropriate life- and health-preserving care.

Of course, this is not a threat to healthy newborns in Minnesota.  Certainly, babies that survive abortions don’t stand a chance.  They will be left to die with no one to advocate for them or report on them.

But we know that parents of unborn children with prenatal disability diagnoses are already under tremendous pressure to abort, and if they do decide to carry the baby to term, they are under pressure to not treat aggressively.  This pressure will only increase because there is no longer a legal standard to treat these babies with more than comfort care.

There are many, many families in Minnesota and across our nation who are fighting everyday for simple healthcare interventions for their disabled children.  Commonly, parents of trisomy-13 and trisomy-18 babies are pressured not to use proven surgical treatments for their child’s common VSD heart defect, despite the fact that these treatments work with a survival rate of 94% and commonly extend their child’s life.

Children seen by the medical establishment as not worth our medical resources are routinely denied common life-preserving treatments by doctors and by insurers.

Again, this callous disregard for our most vulnerable newborn babies will only increase in Minnesota now that there is no longer a legal standard to treat these babies beyond what they consider to be “comfort care.”  Comfort to whom?  Not the child.  Not the parents.  For them, it is an unjust death sentence.

Minnesota, under the leadership of Governor Tim Walz, has gone from cutting our abortion figures by almost 50% to increasing them by 20% in 2022 and most likely another 25-30% over that in 2023.  We have gone from laws that protect women, families, newborns, and unborn children to zero protection for these vulnerable populations and every protection for the abortion industry.

Women, families, unborn children, and vulnerable newborns need protections.  Minnesota pleads with you to pass the federal Born-Alive Infant Protection Act.  Our governor Tim Walz and the democrat-controlled legislature he leads have completely abandoned them.  Please do not follow their lead.  Pass this crucial common-sense legislation now.