Senate Democrats derailed a bill Wednesday that would have required medical providers to perform life-saving care for babies born alive after a failed abortion.

All of the chamber’s Democrats opposed the test vote to overcome an initial filibuster. The 52-47 vote fell along party lines and was short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bill.

The vote was scheduled to coincide with the 52nd annual March for Life in Washington on Friday.

The House is set to vote on its version of the bill before the march. It should pass that chamber, as it did last Congress, since Republicans are in control and there’s no filibuster rule requiring Democratic cooperation.

Republicans championing the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act argued the bill simply provides babies born alive after an attempted abortion with the same rights to medical care as any other newborn.

“This shouldn’t be a controversial bill. We should all be able to agree that a baby born alive after an attempted abortion must be protected,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, said. “And yet Democrats are going to vote against legislation to provide appropriate medical care to living, breathing newborn children.”

Democrats called the bill a “sham” that misrepresents the painful choices women face when a pregnancy is medically complicated and suggests that doctors are illegally killing babies.

“If a baby is born alive and a doctor kills it, that is today illegal, and they would be taken to court and appropriately punished,” Sen. Patty Murray, Washington Democrat, said. 

What the bill does, she said, is interfere in cases where mothers are forced to abort a baby because of a fatal anomaly.

Under the GOP bill, if the baby is born, “that baby will be stripped away from her, and the doctor is told by law, they have to go do all these medical interventions, when actually what those parents really want to do is spend a last few minutes with their dying child,” Ms. Murray said.

Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, said that Democrats assertions that the bill is only relative to cases where there’s a pregnancy complication or a fatal medical condition is “not true.”

“This bill is about a viable child that was delivered late term that’s now on the table alive,” he said. “There are adults walking around today that survived an abortion, like Melissa Ohden and other folks that I know personally.”

Limited data is available on how many babies are delivered after a botched abortion because only eight states track it, but there were 277 cases in those states over a several-year period, Mr. Lankford said.

Democrats said Republicans bringing up the bill goes against their campaign pledge to leave abortion policy to the states. 

“We’re two days into Donald Trump’s presidency, and they’re already breaking their promises,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E Schumer, New York Democrat. “This is the first of many extreme issues they will bring up that are anti-women.”

Republicans argue the bill does nothing to limit abortions but Democrats are worried about the precedent supporting it would set in their quest to protect abortion rights.

“They are afraid if they recognize the humanity of a living, breathing, born baby in an abortion clinic, they might end up pointing to the humanity of the unborn baby in the abortion clinic,” Mr. Thune said. “And so because there is nothing more important to Democrats than abortion, they will vote against legislation to provide appropriate medical care to babies born alive in an abortion clinic, just in case such a law ends up jeopardizing their cherished ’right’ to an abortion.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposed the bill when it passed the House last Congress, calling it a “cruel and misguided attempt to interfere with evidence-based medical decision-making between patients and their physicians.”

Dr. Iffath Abbasi Hoskins, who was the association’s president at the time, called the legislation “reckless.”

“Abortions later in pregnancy are the result of complex decisions, and patients make these health care decisions thoughtfully, carefully, and painstakingly,” she said.

• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.