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Former nurse reveals babies born alive are left to die – could soon be reality for Northern Ireland

A former nurse has revealed how babies born alive in ‘failed’ abortions in the US are being left to die, something which could happen under the Conservative’s proposed extreme abortion framework for Northern Ireland.

Jill Stanek, now the National Campaign Chair to US-based pro-life charity Susan B. Anthony List, testified about her “traumatising experience” before the US Senate Judiciary Committee to make a case for passing the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

If passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate and signed into law by President Donald Trump, the Act would require healthcare professionals to give the same degree of care to babies who survive ‘failed’ abortions as they do to any other newborn.

Under the Conservative Government’s proposed framework for abortion in Northern Ireland such protections won’t be offered to babies who survive abortions there.

Jill described in graphic detail the procedure known as ‘labour-induced abortion’, stating that the goal of the procedure is simply “to cause a pregnant mother’s cervix to open so that she will prematurely deliver a baby who dies during the birth process or soon afterward…”

“Although some doctors kill babies before starting this procedure by injecting a medication or potassium chloride through her mother’s abdomen into the baby’s heart to cause instant cardiac arrest, many… don’t.

“In the event a baby was aborted alive, he or she received no medical assessments or care but was only given what my hospital called ‘comfort care.’”

Jill then shared her own experience from her time as a nurse at a hospital that committed abortions.

In a particularly horrifying episode, one mother “was not only shocked when her little boy was aborted alive, she was also shocked that he didn’t appear to have the external physical deformities she had been told he was going to have. The mother screamed for someone to help her baby, and my colleague rushed to call a neonatologist over from the unit.”

“The mother was so traumatised that my friend had to give her a tranquilizer,” she added. The baby died within half an hour.

Recounting the night a baby with Down’s syndrome who had survived an abortion and was left to die in the hospital’s soiled utility room she said:

“I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone, so I rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about half a pound, and was about the size of my hand.”

She added: “From what I observed, it was not uncommon for a live aborted baby to linger for an hour or two or even longer. One abortion survivor I was aware of lived for almost eight hours.”

The hospital Jill worked has previously admitted “between 10 percent and 20 percent” of ‘aborted’ babies “survive for short periods.”

Another night, while an abortion was taking place in one room, Jill recalled that she needed help with the delivery of a wanted full-term baby just a few doors down the hall.

However, when she asked for help, the nurse taking care of the aborting mother and aborted baby told her that she and a fellow nurse were “busy”.

Jill said: “I thought about how insane it was that there was no one to help me with my healthy delivery only because they were busy wrapping another baby they had caused to die.”

The debate will continue in both the US Senate and House of Representatives. However, in Northern Ireland no such debate will occur.

In the proposed framework, there is no mention of a legal requirement that babies born alive after an abortion are resuscitated or provided with medical assistance, despite the issue being more common than many people first think.

In 2008, a UK report found that 66 infants were born alive after NHS terminations in one year. The majority of those 66 babies took over an hour to die. 

In Victoria, Australia, where there is a similarly extreme abortion law, scores of babies were left to die after being removed alive during a number of ‘failed’ terminations, according to one official review

The review reported that in 2011 there were 40 ‘terminations of pregnancy’ after 20 weeks ‘resulting in live birth’. While these figures are comparable in scale, Victoria’s population of 5.5 million is just a tenth of Britain’s.

This shows the scale of this problem in an environment where there are very few legal safeguards around abortion.

Dear reader,

You may be surprised to learn that our 24-week abortion time limit is out of line with the majority of European Union countries, where the most common time limit for abortion on demand or on broad social grounds is 12 weeks gestation.

The latest guidance from the British Association of Perinatal Medicine enables doctors to intervene to save premature babies from 22 weeks. The latest research indicates that a significant number of babies born at 22 weeks gestation can survive outside the womb, and this number increases with proactive perinatal care.

This leaves a real contradiction in British law. In one room of a hospital, doctors could be working to save a baby born alive at 23 weeks whilst, in another room of that same hospital, a doctor could perform an abortion that would end the life of a baby at the same age.

The majority of the British population support reducing the time limit. Polling has shown that 70% of British women favour a reduction in the time limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks or below.

Please click the button below to sign the petition to the Prime Minister, asking him to do everything in his power to reduce the abortion time limit.