(LifeSiteNews) — The Missouri Senate has advanced a bill aimed at protecting infants born alive following an attempted abortion. But the pro-life activist who pushed for the bill says recent changes would likely kill the law in the future, reports the Missouri Independent.

Missouri’s “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” advanced through the state Senate last week, but far from being unscathed. The bill was created to protect babies born alive after an attempted abortion who might otherwise be left to die in the operating room. If passed, it would allow criminal charges to be brought against anyone who intentionally allowed an infant to die following a failed abortion.

“Whoever, with intent to do so, shall take the life of a child aborted alive, shall be guilty of murder of the second degree,” reads the bill.

For healthcare providers, this would mean they could receive the death penalty for failing to provide life-saving care to these infants.

After Senate Democrats threatened to use the filibuster, revisions were made to the bill’s language to limit possible lawsuits against abortion providers. However, that was not the change that most concerned Sam Lee, a pro-life activist and one of the original drafters of the legislation.

The addition of a “nonseverability clause” into the bill was his main concern. In effect, this would mean that if a court determined any part of the bill to be unconstitutional, the remainder of the law would also be thrown out. Lee refused to support the bill as it passed through the Senate, calling the addition of the nonseverability clause a “poison pill.”

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Missouri Republican Senator Brad Hudson sponsored the bill and tried to settle the fears of pro-life advocates who feared future litigation would kill the bill.

“Anytime we do anything big, there’s that potential for litigation, right? That’s just the way it is,” stated Hudson.

“If we shied away from doing big things because we were afraid someone was going to sue, we wouldn’t do the things that the people, I would say, expect us to do up here.”

Babies dying in the operating room is becoming an increasingly disturbing trend among healthcare providers. In Canada, a pro-life group recently outlined the extent that abortion providers go to kill newborn infants.

Prolife Alberta warned that “infants are still being born alive following labour-induced late-term abortions and left to die,” citing 17 reported cases in Alberta last year.

“Last year it was 17, Seventeen babies. Seventeen times. Seventeen moments where the line between born and unborn was crossed, but care did not follow,” said the group.