ANNAPOLIS (LifeSiteNews) — Maryland lawmakers have introduced legislation that state pro-lifers warn would make it effectively impossible to enforce laws against the killing of babies fully delivered alive after botched abortions.

HB 1131, the so-called Pregnancy Outcome Protection Act, states that an “individual who experienced a pregnancy loss may not be subject to investigation, civil liability, or criminal prosecution for experiencing a pregnancy loss” unless “there is independent evidence of criminal conduct unrelated to the pregnancy or pregnancy loss,” or the mother gives investigators consent “to investigate suspected criminal conduct of another person related to the pregnancy or pregnancy loss.”

It also states that a “provider acting within the provider’s scope of practice may not be subject to investigation, criminal penalty, or civil liability for supporting a patient who is experiencing a pregnancy loss or after a pregnancy loss.”

Maryland Right to Life warns that the practical application of this language would make it “nearly impossible” for law enforcement to investigate cases of infants left to die or actively killed right after delivery or for medical providers from reporting evidence of the same.

The group further notes that pregnant women themselves cannot be the ones protected by this legislation, as “women are already immune from prosecution for miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion under state and federal law.”

“This bill is not about protecting existing rights, but about actively stripping away the state’s current ability to protect newborns,” argued Maryland Right to Life executive director Laura Bogley. “This bill would formalize a ‘zone of lawlessness’ where a child’s right to life depends entirely on the mother’s intent, even after the child is outside the womb.”

The abortion lobby has long attempted to paint infanticide as an imaginary problem, but the facts show it is very real. “Although the United States fails to record reliable data on abortion survivors, we have estimated, through Canadian government extrapolations, that 1,734 infants are born alive after a failed abortion procedure every year in the United States,” says the Abortion Survivors Network. “In other words, about 2 out of every 1,000 abortions result in a live birth. After 49.5 years of Roe v Wade, 85,817 babies lived through an abortion procedure.”

In September 2024, the Family Research Council (FRC) wrote that “State-level abortion reporting statistics from nine states show that at least 277 infants have survived abortion since 2006.” Only eight states require reporting such data, and there are no federal reporting requirements on the subject, guaranteeing the real number is higher. Several former abortion industry insiders and policy scholars have told Congress or admitted under oath that infanticide after failed abortions happens beyond the notice of official numbers.

Infanticide is technically illegal nationwide under the under the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002. However, BAIPA “did not directly create civil or criminal penalties,” as admitted by a 2019 PolitiFact article (which nevertheless gave Trump a “False” rating on the subject, which LifeSiteNews dissected at the time). That law was “toothless and purely symbolic,” the article quoted University of Massachusetts law professor and Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund member Dwight Duncan as saying. Yet for at least the past decade, congressional Democrats have consistently voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would mandate basic medical care for abortion-surviving newborns with penalties that existing law lacks.

As of September 2024, only 18 states have laws requiring medical care for infants delivered alive after attempted abortions, according to FRC, leaving abortionists free to commit infanticide in a majority of the country.