With increasing volume I’ve been trying to make the pro-life community understand that aborting babies alive and letting them die or outright killing them is a commonplace – rampant – occurrence in U.S. hospitals and abortion mills despite the 2002 passage of the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act.
That we get this fact is imperative with the election of Barack Obama as president alongside a Congress now fully controlled by the abortion industry.
Obama is key. As most know, he took tremendous heat during his 2008 campaign for adamantly opposing Born Alive as Illinois state senator and was forced to protest loudly that, of course, he opposed infanticide of abortion survivors. Rest assured pro-abort congressional members were watching, glad it wasn’t them on the hot seat. The pro-life community must now make Obama and a Senate and House that both voted overwhelmingly for Born Alive prove it.
How do we know post-abortion infanticide is widespread? The procedure resulting in live births – induced labor abortion – is now the late-term abortion procedure of choice. Read that last sentence again. Ask anyone who sidewalk counsels at late-term mills. A mother goes in one day to have her cervix dilated and the next to expel the baby.
When Students for Life of America went undercover at a New Jersey Planned Parenthood abortion mill last October, the counselor responded, “There is none,” when asked what late-term option besides induced labor abortion was available. The counselor also admitted aborting babies alive “does happen.”
Late-term Orlando abortionist James Pendergraft even advertises on his mill’s web page that babies can be aborted alive:
Don’t be fooled about the “reasonable steps” nonsense. Pendergraft is the same abortionist who owns EPOC Clinic, where a mother in 2005 delivered her baby alive in the toilet and mill workers not only refused to resuscitate the baby but turned away emergency medical personnel called to the scene by the mother’s friend. Baby Rowan’s story was made into a short movie, “22Weeks,” which premiered two weeks ago in Washington, D.C. The actual 911 call can be heard on YouTube.
There are several reasons abortionists favor induced labor abortion. First, cervix dilators (a pill called Misoprostol, aka Cytotec, or seaweed-sticks called laminaria) are all that is needed for this procedure, and both are very cheap. Cytotec costs medical professionals only 25 cents each.
Second, no nasty surgery, like dilatation and evacuation (D&E), is involved. No need for sterilized instruments or IV sedation or even an operating room. Babies are delivered in toilets or waiting rooms.
Third, doctors need not even be present. In hospitals, they relegate insertion of the dilators and delivery of the baby to residents and nurses. Often in abortion mills, they are not even on the premises when the baby is born.
There are no valid statistics in the U.S. on the number of babies who survive their abortions. A study published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2007 found 18 of 20 hospitals sampled committed induced labor abortion, and an average of one in 30 babies survived for an average of 80 minutes. This rate of live births increased to one in 10 when babies were 23 gestational weeks.
This is in line with the admission Illinois’ Christ Hospital made to the Chicago Sun-Times in 2001, “that between 10 percent and 20 percent of fetuses with genetic defects that are aborted [by the induced labor abortion procedure] survive for short periods outside the womb,” or as high as one in five.
Last week, after waiting two and a half years for justice, Sycloria Williams filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of her daughter Shanice against 13 defendants associated with the now-defunct A Gyn Diagnostic Center in Hialeah, Fla. Shanice was aborted alive there in July 2006.
Mill owner Belkis Gonzalez allegedly cut the baby’s cord, placed the baby in a biohazard bag filled with bleach, and tossed the baby in bag onto the clinic roof when an anonymous tipster notified police. Police retrieved the baby nine days later after receiving another tip and positively identified Shanice as Sycloria’s daughter via DNA testing. The county medical examiner determined the baby had breathed but failed to label the death a homicide, instead stating the baby died of “extreme prematurity.”
I’m convinced every day in America a variation of this horror story is being committed, and often.
Pro-lifers must grasp this is not an uncommon occurrence and rise up to demand a pro-abortion federal government prove it is not pro-infanticide.