I admit it. I am a single issue voter. I came out of the closet during a lengthy discussion on my front porch last night with a good friend of mine. Oh I’ve tried “nuance”. I’ve attempted to hide my “embarrassment” at being so “narrow-minded” and hide my “inability” to see the moral equivalence between all issues great and small. But I’ve tired of that. I am what I am, as a famous sailorman once said. And until our country rids itself of this shame and sees this for the greater evil and as being not on par with anything else equivalency-wise, there is no way that the Christian evangelical wing…or any wing…can claim our country “showered with blessings from God.”
This is too much for you. You cannot read this all the way through. You’re angry at me for having the audacity to put it here. If any of this is true for you I have to ask you: why does it bother you? Why? There were many who turned a blind eye to slavery and justified it for economic reasons. There were many more who knew about the events taking place in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Within Stalinist Russia. Many who knew of the horrors within the gulags and workcamps of Eastern Europe after WW2. It’s going on today in Castro’s Cuba, Communist China and North Korea. People are being systematically eradicated. By the State. By their government. Only in America we don’t wait to murder them after they’ve been around for several years. We murder them mercilessly and with malice of forethought before they have a chance to breathe the air.
What are we so damned afraid of that we sanction this and allow this to continue?
Update: The 40 Days for Life campaign kicks off nationally, as well as in Lincoln, on Sept. 24.
107THCONGRESS REPORT
” HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
1st Session 107–186
BORN-ALIVE INFANTS PROTECTION ACT OF 2001
AUGUST 2, 2001.—Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State
of the Union and ordered to be printed
Mr. SENSENBRENNER, from the Committee on the Judiciary,
Submitted the following REPORT together with ADDITIONAL AND DISSENTING VIEWS
[To accompany H.R. 2175]
[Including cost estimate of the Congressional Budget Office]A. ‘‘Live-Birth’’ Abortions
The legal and moral confusion that flows from these pernicious ideas is well illustrated by disturbing events that are alleged to have occurred at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. Two nurses from the hospital’s delivery ward, Jill Stanek and Allison Baker (who is no longer employed by the hospital), testified before the Subcommittee on the Constitution that physicians at Christ Hospital have performed numerous ‘‘induced labor’’ or ‘‘live-birth’’ abortions, a procedure in which physicians use drugs to induce premature labor and deliver unborn children, many of whom are sometimes still alive, and then simply allow those who are born alive to die.27According to medical experts, this procedure is appropriately used only in situations in which an unborn child has a fatal deformity, such as anencephaly or lack of a brain, and infants with such conditions who are born alive are given comfort care (including warmth and nutrition) until they die, which, because of the fatal deformity, is typically within a day or two of birth. According to the testimony of Mrs. Stanek and Mrs. Baker, however, physicians at Christ Hospital have used the procedure to abort healthy infants and infants with non-fatal deformities such as spina bifida and Down Syndrome.28Many of these babies have lived for hours after birth, with no efforts made to determine if any of them could have survived with appropriate medical assistance.29 The nurses have also witnessed hospital staff taking many of these live-born babies into a ‘‘soiled utility closet’’ where the babies would remain until death.30Comfort care, the nurses say, was only provided sporadically.31
Mrs. Stanek, who testified in front of the Subcommittee on the Constitution during its hearing on H.R. 4292 and H.R. 2175, testified regarding numerous live-birth abortions that she alleges have occurred at Christ Hospital. The first she described as follows:
One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down’s Syndrome baby who was born alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about 1⁄2pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I couldn’t tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall. After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where all of our dead patients are taken.32
Mrs. Stanek testified about another aborted baby who was thought to have had spina bifida, but was delivered with an intact spine.33 On another occasion, an aborted baby ‘‘was left to die on the counter of the Soiled Utility Room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown in the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the baby, the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor.’’34Mrs. Stanek further testified regarding a live-birth abortion that was performed on a healthy infant at more than 23 weeks gestation, a stage of development at which premature infants have an almost 40% chance of survival.35According to Mrs. Stanek, [t]he baby was born alive. If the mother had wanted everything done for her baby, there would have been a neonatologist, pediatric resident, neonatal nurse, and respiratory therapist present for the delivery, and the baby would have been taken to our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for specialized care. Instead, the only personnel present for this delivery were an obstetrical resident and my co-worker. After delivery the baby, who showed early signs of thriving, was merely wrapped in a blanket and kept in the Labor & Delivery Department until she died 21⁄2hours later.36
Mrs. Baker testified regarding three live-birth abortions she witnessed at Christ Hospital. According to Mrs. Baker, she was informed about the live-birth abortions, described by the hospital as ‘‘therapeutic abortions,’’ when she began working in the high risk labor and delivery unit at Christ Hospital in August 1998. She described her first encounter with this procedure as follows: The first occurred on a day shift. I happened to walk into a ‘‘soiled utility room’’ and saw, lying on the metal counter, a fetus, naked, exposed and breathing, moving its arms and legs. The fetus was visibly alive, and was gasping for breath. I left to find the nurse who was caring for the patient and this fetus. When I asked her about the fetus, she said that she was so busy with the mother that she didn’t have time to wrap and place the fetus in a warmer, and she asked if I would do that for her. Later I found out that the fetus was 22 weeks old, and had undergone a therapeutic abortion because it had been diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome. I did wrap the fetus and place him in a warmer and for 21⁄2hours he maintained a heartbeat, and then fi- nally expired.37
The second induced-labor abortion Mrs. Baker witnessed involved a 20 week-old fetus with spina bifida who was born alive. According to Mrs. Baker, [d]uring the time the fetus was alive, the patient kept asking me when the fetus would die. For an hour and 45 minutes the fetus maintained a heartbeat. The parents were frustrated, and obviously not prepared for this long period of time. Since I was the nurse of both the mother and the fetus, I held the fetus in my arms until it finally expired.38
The third incident witnessed by Mrs. Baker involved a 16 week-old fetus with Down’s Syndrome. ‘‘Again,’’ Mrs. Baker testified, ‘‘I walked into the soiled utility room and the fetus was fully exposed, 39 Id. lying on the baby scale.’’39 Mrs. Baker then found the nurse who was caring for the mother and the baby and offered her assistance. ‘‘When I went back into the soiled utility room,’’ Mrs. Baker said, ‘‘the fetus was moving its arms and legs. I then listened for a heartbeat, and found that the fetus was still alive. I wrapped the fetus and in 45 minutes the fetus finally expired.’’40 When allegations such as these were first made against Christ Hospital, the hospital claimed that this procedure was only used ‘‘when doctors determine the fetus has serious problems, such as lack of a brain, that would prevent long-term survival.’’41 Later, however, the hospital changed its position, announcing that although it had performed abortions on infants with non-fatal birth defects, it was changing its policy and would henceforth use the procedure to abort only fatally-deformed infants.42
B. Confusion Regarding the Status of Abortion Survivors
The confusion regarding the status of abortion survivors is reflected in events that happened two years ago in Cincinnati, Ohio. A young woman learned she was pregnant and sought the assistance at the clinic of the abortionist Dr. Martin Haskell, inventor of one variation of the partial-birth abortion procedure.43Dr. Haskell performed the first step of the partial-birth abortion procedure—dilating the woman’s cervix—and she was to return the next day. The next morning the woman began experiencing severe abdominal pains and reported to the emergency room of Bethesda North Medical Center in Cincinnati. While she was being examined, the young woman gave birth to a baby girl.44 The attending physician placed the baby in a specimen dish—like any other substance that is removed from the body—to be taken to the lab by a medical technician. When the technician, Shelly Lowe, saw the baby girl in the dish she was stunned when she saw the girl gasping for air. ‘‘I don’t think I can do that,’’ Ms. Lowe reportedly said. ‘‘This baby is alive.’’45After doctors concluded that the baby was too premature to survive (by some estimates she was born at 22 weeks, although some members of the hospital staff believed she was older), Ms. Lowe held the baby, whom she named ‘‘Baby Hope,’’ until the child died, wrapping her in a blanket and singing to her as she stroked her cheeks. Ms. Lowe said: ‘‘I wanted her to feel that she was wanted. . . . She was a perfectly formed newborn, entering the world too soon through no choice of her own.’’46 Surprisingly, Baby Hope lived for 3 hours, without the benefit of an incubator or other intensive care, and breathing room air, but her condition was not reassessed by the physicians.47 And although it is impossible to determine at this point whether a reassessment would have made any difference in Baby Hope’s ultimate survival, the lack of any uch reassessment, coupled with the attending physician’s initial placement of then-breathing Baby Hope in a specimen dish, at least raises serious questions as to whether a similarly-situated infant who was wanted by her mother would have received the same treatment.
Confusion regarding the legal status of abortion survivors is not a problem only in the United States. Evidence of this confusion can be further illustrated by events that occurred in Professor Peter Singer’s native country of Australia. On April 10, 2000, in Sydney, Australia, a Coroners Court heard testimony regarding a baby who survived an abortion in 1998 and lived for 80 minutes while hospital staff waited for the baby to die.48 When the midwife nurse called the abortion doctor (who was not present) to inform him that the baby had survived, he responded, ‘‘So?’’49 The nurse then did what she could to make the baby comfortable, covering her with a blanket to keep her warm until her breathing and heartbeat slowed and she died.50
The coroner who investigated this incident condemned the actions of the abortion doctor, stating that ‘‘‘[t]he [baby] having been born alive deserved all the dignity, respect and value that our society places on human life. . . . The fact that her birth was unexpected and not the desired outcome of the [abortion] should not result in her and babies like her being perceived as anything less than a complete human being.’’’51Noting that the old, infirm, sick and terminally ill are all entitled to proper medical and palliative care and attention, the coroner stated that ‘‘newly-born unwanted and premature babies should have the same rights. The fact that [the baby’s] death was inevitable should not affect her entitlement to such care and attention.’’52
A similar incident occurred in Germany in 1998.53In that case, an infant survived an abortion attempt at 25 weeks gestation. The doctors who attempted to abort the baby left it wrapped in a blanket for 10 hours ‘‘under observation’’ but without any medical assistance. The doctors then consulted with the parents and decided to provide the baby medical assistance. The infant survived, but was severely damaged and has had several operations. The German government brought charges against the physicians.
