“Shoot straight you bastards, shoot! Don’t make a mess of it.”313
—HARRY MORANT, in the film Breaker Morant
What if an abortion is attempted and the child lives? This seems like an almost unthinkable situation, but it happens. Should we let it live? Should we kill it on the doctor’s table? These are the hard cases that get far less attention from the Left. Just as cases of abortion due to incest and rape are extremely rare, children born from botched abortions are also rare. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss them. Just as we should discuss cases of rape and incest, we should discuss botched abortions. This is the issue Democrat governor Ralph Northam weighed in on with his controversial comments, even though he is still the governor of Virginia today.
But first, for some background, let’s look back at some eye-opening testimony from the year 1999. In a hearing before U.S. Congress in Washington, DC, a nurse named Jill Stanek stood up and addressed Congress with this description:
The method of abortion that Christ Hospital in Oaklawn, Illinois, uses is called “induced labor abortion,” also now known as “live birth abortion.” This type of abortion can be performed different ways, but the goal always is to cause a pregnant woman’s cervix to open so that she will deliver a premature baby who dies during the birth process or soon afterward. The way that induced abortion is most often executed at my hospital is by the physician inserting a medication called Cytotec into the birth canal close to the cervix. Cytotec irritates the cervix and stimulates it to open. When this occurs, the small, pre-term baby drops out of the uterus, oftentimes alive. It is not uncommon for one of these live aborted babies to linger for an hour or two or even longer. One of them once lived for almost eight hours. In the event that a baby is aborted alive, he or she receives no medical assessments or care but is only given what my hospital calls “comfort care.” “Comfort care” is defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until he or she dies, although even this minimal compassion is not always provided. It is not required that these babies be held during their short lives.
Stanek related another personal experience:
One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down’s Syndrome [sic] baby who was born alive to our Soiled Utility Room because [the little boy’s] 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.… 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.
The nurse then offered another example: “A Support Associate told me about a live aborted baby who was left to die on the counter of the Soiled Utility Room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown into 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.” She said, “We look the other way and pretend that these babies aren’t human while they’re alive but human only after they are dead. We issue these babies both birth and death certificates, but it is really only the death certificate that matters. No other children in America are medically abandoned like this.”
Then, commenting on what she had just reported, Nurse Stanek added, “Abortion is a cancer that is literally killing America. It is killing our children while it is killing our consciences. It began when we took God out of our decision-making and proclaimed that the little beings growing inside of women were ‘products of conception’ and not little girls and little boys. Who should be surprised that we keep pushing the envelope so that now we are aborting these ‘products of conception’ alive?”314
This testimony exposed the extremes to which the pro-choice, or rather, pro-abortion movement was willing to go. Roe never contemplated late-term abortions or infanticide. The debate hadn’t gone there yet. Nobody thought we were talking about this kind of circumstance. But since Roe v. Wade, the floodgates have opened and babies are being intentionally killed or left to die outside the womb. Jill Stanek’s testimony was a pivotal turning point, calling out the horrors that have become part of our culture.
One would think that these instances are extremely rare. But they happen far too often. In 1997, Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, estimated that the method was used three thousand to five thousand times annually. “In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along,” Fitzsimmons said.315 In November 1995, Mr. Fitzsimmons recalled the night in when he appeared on Nightline on ABC and “lied through my teeth” when he said the procedure was used rarely and only on women whose lives were in danger or whose fetuses were damaged.316 In January 2003, even the Guttmacher Institute—an affiliate of Planned Parenthood—published a survey of abortion providers that estimated that 2,200 abortions were performed by this method in the year 2000.317
The Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA) was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002 in order to prevent doctors from killing babies outside the womb, even if they had intended to abort them. It states: “the words ‘person,’ ‘human being,’ ‘child,’ and ‘individual’ shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive… at any stage of development.”318 One would think this would be a nonpartisan issue—one that both Republicans and Democrats would support. But this is not so.
The Democratic Party wants these babies killed. President Bill Clinton vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the controversial procedure in 1997. There were enough opponents in the House of Representatives to override his veto but not in the Senate. As an Illinois senator, Barack Obama voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act twice; as chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee in 2003, he prevented it from advancing to the floor. Obama then became a two-term president, and between 2008 and 2016 we saw the radicalization of the Democratic Party and the abortion debate. Now, the Democratic Party platform advocates for abortions when a woman is nine months pregnant. Where does it stop?
Governor Northam of Virginia is only the latest installment of the Democratic support of what amounts to infanticide. Northam supported born-alive abortions last year and used the explicit language of “comfort care.” Northam, a pediatric neurosurgeon, said of an infant intended to be aborted, “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” He added, “We want the government not to be involved in these types of decisions. We want the decision to be made by the mothers and their providers.”319 He was not asked to step down by other Democrats in his party. Ralph Northam, whose nickname in college was “Coonman,” was even caught having dressed up with a friend. One was dressed as a KKK member in a full hood and the other in blackface, and the Democrats still would not denounce Northam. The Democrats will stop at nothing to fulfill their pro-abortion agenda, and since Northam is one of them, they protect him.
This horror is seeping through our nation. There are babies to this day who are born alive and thrown in trash cans to die.320 Nothing leads us to believe that these procedures are practiced less often today than in 1997. We can assume this because of the vehement opposition to the bill Republicans are trying to pass, which would hold people accountable for killing these children after they are born. Called the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, it is intended “to prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.” It shouldn’t be controversial at all, but it is. Why would Democrats try to stop this if in fact infants were no longer born alive and killed? It is likely that they are covering for their abortion clinic counterparts, organizations like Planned Parenthood, whom they support and who conduct these atrocities.
The purpose of medicine is healing. It’s to take people who are sick or dying and make them better. The irony of abortion is if an abortion is successful, you end up with a dead child. If the abortion fails, you end up with a live baby that you have just tried to kill, who is likely physically harmed from the experience. This is an inversion of the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors who take part in performing abortions other than to preserve the life of the mother are violating their ethic to save lives. Killing is killing. This may be lawful killing, but if you are not saving a life, you are purely killing.
There are millions of successful abortions—sixty-one million and counting in America since Roe v. Wade. And out of these abortions come dead bodies. There are also unsuccessful abortions, which are often called botched abortions. These are babies that abortionists tried to kill but something went wrong in the process and the baby somehow lived through it. Some of these children were killed outside the womb, as described above, by being left to die in a utility room with no nutrients. The general practice after a baby is born alive is to kill it by suffocation, strangulation, leaving the baby to die, or throwing the baby away. Many are thrown into trash cans, literally discarded. But depending on the particular abortion clinic, some of these survivors are sent to an emergency room where they are revived and treated, and some are alive today. Many of these survivors have physical deformities and other permanent scars from their horrific experience. Some are mentally handicapped—some more functional than others—but most are permanently scarred from the procedure.
Gianna Jessen is an abortion survivor. It says so on her medical records: “born during saline abortion.” Her birth certificate was signed by her abortionist. A saline abortion is when saline is injected into the womb. The baby is poisoned and burned alive. It typically takes about an hour for the baby to die. A day or so later, the mother gives birth to a stillborn. Somehow, Gianna was born alive. “I should be blind, I should be burned, I should be dead,” says Gianna. “But I’m not.”321 In Gianna’s case, a nurse called an ambulance, and she was transferred to a hospital. She was placed in an emergency foster care home. Today she has cerebral palsy.
Her cerebral palsy was caused by the lack of oxygen to her brain when she was trying to survive in the womb while the abortionist was trying to kill her with saline. Before she was injected with saline, she was a perfectly healthy baby. She wouldn’t have cerebral palsy had it not been for this direct attack on her. She lived in foster care until she was adopted at age four. One may wonder how a person like Gianna can go through life without anger. But she does say this: “If abortion were merely about women’s rights, what were mine?”
But she is incredibly strong. “You didn’t get me. The silent Holocaust didn’t win over me,” she says. She knows she has been hated since conception, but she also knows she is loved by the only one whose love matters, and that’s God. “I’m His girl,” she says.
Gianna is disgusted by arguments that say that women should have abortions because the child might be disabled. She speaks about how the Lord loves the weakest in society and what arrogance it is to argue that you are better than someone else. She has forgiven her biological mother. She has forgiven those who have hurt her. She is focused on the future and has dedicated her life to speaking up for the voiceless. She is hated by many on the Left because she represents what they hate, and that is hope for an end to abortion. She represents the living consequence of what it means to harm another human being. She speaks out, and they don’t like it.
Gianna is just one of many survivors of an abortion attempt. Another is Melissa Ohden, who, despite fears of terrible disabilities, grew up to live a perfectly healthy life with an adoptive family. But emotionally, she was crippled. She grew up and found her birth mother, who had no idea she had survived the abortion. It was a defining moment in Melissa’s life to meet her mother. She learned that the abortionist who performed the procedure on her was a friend of her family. She forgave her birth mother and cultivated a relationship with her. Melissa changed and ended up being grateful for her life. She now says, “I am one of the luckiest people in the world.”322
Another is Claire Culwell. Her birth mother had an abortion when she was five months pregnant. But little did she know she was pregnant with twins. One of the babies died, but the other survived. The baby that survived, Claire, was born with dislocated hips and club feet. Claire now says, “I was in body casts to correct what the abortion had done.” 323 Another is Josiah Presley, who was maimed due to an attempt to kill him by the suction method of abortion. He survived. He was adopted and loved and says of preborn children, “They are innocent and can’t defend themselves against these huge abortion bullies killing them.”324
Stories like Gianna’s and Josiah’s are not typical, but neither are they uncommon. Chip Roy (R-TX) stood up among other congressmen in November 2019 and related the moving story of a child who underwent being aborted but lived through it. The doctors encouraged the parents to complete the abortion after it had failed, but the parents said to let the child and his twin live. He then said that one of those children was on the house floor and pointed to him. Sure enough, he is one of the staffers working for the congressman.325 The room was left in awe.
How many more children will we let this happen to? These people were tortured and lived to tell the tale. While the Left tries to silence them, their voices are louder than ever and more inspiring than ever. We must fight for their lives and the lives of the unborn.