A French student midwife has come forward with a horrible tale of infanticide. In a document released by the European Centre for Law and Justice, a student midwife identified as MK tells the following harrowing story:
It happened in 2015, in the hospital delivery room. One patient was present, she was 22 weeks +3 days amenorrheic [without a period] and was there for a late miscarriage. The child was born alive, and to prevent it from crying, the doctor quickly covered his face. He was then taken into a side room (baby resuscitation room) where I could join him. I was able to find that there was no apparent defect, he struggled to breathe and he had some slight gestures.
He was fully formed, had eyelashes, hair, nails … (He had even slightly long nails!) He weighed 565g and was about 27cm. The doctor came in and asked me if he was still breathing, or else we would make an injection for that “to be resolved.”
Five minutes later he came back and grabbed a syringe KCl (lethal injection for this premature baby). Somewhat bewildered, I asked him if we cannot do something “more natural”, but he answers my question by sweeping [sic] he prefers not to let the child suffer. He then pierced the baby in the heart, and injected the product. The child, during the injection, moved all its members. I do not know what that meant, but perhaps he suffered.
The doctor may have felt the baby was too young to resuscitate. However, some babies born at 22 weeks survive. An article in the New York Times, a publication not known to be friendly to the pro-life movement, summarized a study that showed that some premature babies born at 22 weeks survive with few or no medical complications.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that one third of babies born at 22 weeks and given medical care survived. Life News wrote about baby Micah Pickering, who was born at 22 weeks in 2012, and is now a healthy toddler. So the French baby did have a chance at survival.
Even after being injected, the child did not die immediately:
The little boy lived just a quarter of an hour. The medical team told the parents of the child that he was stillborn. This is why we did not want him to cry at birth: it would be too traumatic for them.
What shocked me personally, is the cold-blooded doctor (head of department) that had injected the child in the heart. The fact that the child was alive was a problem that needed to be addressed: it has never been contemplated to tell the parents what really happened.
This baby was not given a chance. He was not even given a name.
The parents never knew their baby was born alive. They were simply told their child was stillborn, and would never know that the baby might have been saved. One wonders how many premature babies have suffered a similar fate at this hospital and others.
This child deserved better than a lethal injection, and his parents deserved to have the hospital treat their baby. Children born at 22 weeks are human beings who deserve medical treatment and a chance at life— not a violent, painful death.
