The bill passed the Missouri House by a vote of 102-46 on May 13 after clearing the Senate, and it carries real penalties. Under the new law, anyone who knowingly performs or attempts an overt act to kill an infant born alive after a failed abortion now faces a charge of first-degree murder. Sen. Brad Hudson carried the bill in the Senate; Rep. Brian Seitz, R-Branson, and Rep. Holly Jones sponsored it in the House.
"They're deserving of health care. It's just common sense," Seitz said of the infants the law now protects. "This legislation protects infants and it protects women."
Susan Klein, executive director of Missouri Right to Life, said the statute closes a gap that opponents of the bill have long insisted does not exist. "Opponents of this bill claim that these babies are already protected, but this is not true," Klein said. Missouri's law goes further than the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, which recognizes the personhood of a child born alive during an abortion but sets no criminal penalty for a caregiver who withholds treatment — a gap Congress has tried and failed to close ever since.
A Law Cannot Give What Only God Gives
Set the statute book down for a moment and look at what it is actually arguing about. Grown men and women in a capitol building spent months debating whether a baby breathing air outside the womb is a person deserving of a doctor's hands. My friend, that a legislature had to settle such a question at all tells you something true and something sorrowful about the age we live in. But it also tells you that Missouri got the answer right, and got it right because the answer was never really in doubt. It was written before the bill, before the vote, before the debate — written into the child at the very beginning.
"I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." (Psalm 139:14)
David did not write that psalm about a fully grown man standing in the sun. He wrote it looking back at the hidden work God did on him in his mother's womb, before he had a name, before he had a vote cast for him by anyone. "Marvellous are thy works," he said — not "useful," not "convenient," not "wanted." Marvellous. That word does not change whether the child is still inside the womb or has just been laid, crying, in a nurse's arms. The worth was fixed by the Maker, not by the moment of birth, and no committee room can vote it up or down.
Scripture says the same of the prophet before he ever preached a sermon: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee" (Jeremiah 1:5). Knew. Sanctified. Set apart. Those are not words for a mass of cells. Those are words for a person, known by name to God before his own mother knew he was there.
A law like Missouri's is a mercy, and it is right to be grateful for lawmakers who will stand up and say plainly that a living child deserves a doctor's care and not a murderer's hand. But no statute, however well written, reaches the deeper sickness that makes such a law necessary in the first place. That sickness is in the heart of man, not merely in the policy of a nation. It is the old, old rebellion that decides for itself who counts and who does not, who is worth saving and who is not — and it runs through every one of us, not just through an abortion clinic.
Here is the good news, plain and without decoration: the same God who knit that child together in secret sent His own Son to hang in public, on a cross, for sinners who never deserved a moment's mercy. He did not wait until we were worthy. He did not wait until we were useful. He came for us while we were dead in our sins, the same way He forms a child in the womb before that child has done a single thing to earn it. That is grace — unearned, unasked for, and offered still, today, to whoever will take it by faith in Jesus Christ. The vulnerable child in the delivery room and the hardened sinner reading this sentence are, in God's sight, alike in one thing: both live only because He chose, in love, to give them life.