The Born Alive Infant Protection Act was drafted to mandate life-saving medical care to babies that were born from botched abortion attempts. Some mothers were inducing their babies pre-term in the hopes that the delivery itself would kill the child, but in some cases the baby survived, in which case the medical staff would take the unwanted baby and put it on a shelf in the medical waste closet to die. Sometimes the baby would die in a minute, other times they would live for an hour, laying on a shelf in the medical waste closet.
There was a story in an article I read [found here] that describes one person's experience of one of these infants that was refused medical care. Below is an excerpt from her testimony.
"One night, a nursing coworker was taking an aborted Down's Syndrome baby who was born alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his 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, weighed about ½ pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had -- trying to breathe.
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."
4 comments:
That is seriously horrifying.
Bubba,
I am the mother of a child born at 23 weeks. Because it is legal in this country to terminate pregnancy through the 24th week, we had to request and fight for our daughter's right to resuscitation. She survived and is a normal, healthy, fantastic 11 year old.
However, because at the time of her birth, we lived in a state where the majority of the hospital workers we encountered were God-fearing folks, they granted our request. I have since been informed by medical professionals in the state where I currently reside that if she had been born here, there is a strong chance that we would have been denied the chance to resuscitate her because such babies are considered "lost causes" and the medical resources would have been needed for infants whose chances at survival would have been considered better than our daughter's chances.
Interestingly, after these "micro" preemies (as they are referred to) survive, because they are under 1000 grams at birth, the federal government, that same entity which allows them to be terminated, labels them "disabled until proven otherwise," and picks up all the medical bills for these babies not covered by private medical insurance. The payout is part of the social security income or SSI, and families often continue receiving checks for these children long after their release from the hospital because of other disabilities that many of them have.
So, what do you think of that? My Dad used to refer to this kind of thing as "speaking with forked tongue."
Denise,
Thank you for sharing your experience. You bring up a very interesting point regarding the Federal Government.
And your Dad’s description of the government “speaking with a forked tongue” is very accurate.
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