A recent Facebook trend was a welcome sight for many frustrated pro-lifers who continue to wait upon Congress to pass protections for preborn babies.
Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) and pro-life activist Jill Stanek penned a piece for National Review published June 9, titled, “Abortion Survivors Deserve Our Care.” Sasse has sponsored the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which already passed the U.S. House of Representatives. The article gained traction on Facebook and was featured in the Trending section. Even Facebook’s description of the article should encourage pro-lifers, as it did not obscure the truth…
The authors wrote Thursday in National Review to support the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would offer protections for children who survived abortion or attempted abortion.
Kermit Gosnell (via theaustralian.com.au)
In their article, Sasse and Stanek explain the horrors of convicted abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who aborted babies so late in gestation that some of them were born alive before he “snipped” their spines to kill them. But while Gosnell is in prison, there are others like him who continue to kill babies and freely function in society because not enough is being done to enforce protections for the preborn:
Despite the fact that Americans on both sides of the abortion debate were horrified to learn about Gosnell’s cruelty, federal law does not adequately protect a born child who survives an abortion. Some say these protections are unnecessary, but we know grim reality says otherwise.
We know abortionist Kermit Gosnell routinely murdered abortion survivors, and there may be others out there like him. We know abortion survivors have been put on shelves to die without medical assessments or assistance in hospitals’ soiled utility rooms.
In Texas, abortionist Douglas Karpen committed Gosnell-like atrocities. But with nurses complaining of ‘meat market’ conditions even at Planned Parenthood, it’s extremely likely that Karpen and Gosnell are not alone.
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain, has shown that they are just as extreme as Karpen and Gosnell by lobbying against a bill to protect babies born alive in Florida:
While testifying before a Congressional panel last September, Cecile Richards, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, denied that babies have ever been born alive at her business. But how likely is this, when Planned Parenthood does a third of the nation’s abortions?
Abortion survivor Gianna Jessen
Planned Parenthood and its complicit friends in the media would prefer to pretend as if children simply never survive abortion. When Congressional panels heard testimony from abortion survivors Gianna Jessen and Melissa Ohden last fall, the pro-abortion media actually used scare quotes when referring to these women — both of whom offered proof of their birth circumstances — as abortion ‘survivors.’
But abortion survivors aren’t as rare as Planned Parenthood and the media would like to think. It has been estimated that up to 900 babies survive abortion every year in the United States.
The scenario of babies born alive from abortions and then left to die is a grim reality, not a hypothetical one.
In their article, Sasse and Stanek reference the tragic incidence of 911 tapes revealing that an abortion worker called an ambulance for a 21-week-old baby born alive from an abortion. The abortion facility could not provide the proper care. While the baby was rushed to the hospital, he/she did not survive.
“On this basic reality we must agree: No child should end her life cold and alone, struggling for her last breath inside an abortion clinic,” the authors write as they plea for a consensus.
Stanek herself witnessed this barbaric reality while working as a nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, and it’s what led her to become a pro-life activist.
Much more recently, a 24-week-old baby was left to die in Poland, crying alone for an hour, after being born alive from an abortion. No medical staff came to provide care or even attention.
Many abortion workers have admitted that they have witnessed babies born alive from abortions who were then killed.
In 2013, Live Action released an investigative video project showing a variety of abortionists and abortion facilities admitting that in the event of a baby surviving an abortion, care would not be provided:
Recent studies have shown that babies born premature can still survive, should they get the proper medical care, which makes these abortion providers’ statements even more heinous. Sasse and Stanek note these medical advances, and also remind doctors of what duties they have:
This law would require doctors and nurses to follow through on their Hippocratic oath: to heal and help, according to their skills and ability. It would require health-care providers to interrupt a brutal moment with hope and healing — or face criminal consequences.
The bill would “require any health care practitioner who is present when a child is born alive following an abortion or attempted abortion to: (1) exercise the same degree of care as reasonably provided to any other child born alive at the same gestational age, and (2) ensure that such child is immediately admitted to a hospital.”
The authors conclude:
As Americans, we can’t help but cheer for those who battle the odds. We side with the vulnerable. We fight for the minority. We protect the powerless from the powerful. Three years after Dr. Gosnell’s conviction, little girls and boys are fighting for their lives. They deserve our compassion and protection.
Yes, these are children, who should not be denied life-saving medical care because their parents decided not to carry them to term. It’s horrific enough that preborn children aren’t afforded the right to life and constitutional protections just because they don’t happen to be outside of the womb yet.
Providing common sense care to those born alive during an abortion is something on which everyone should be able to find common ground.
