A woman who aborted her baby downplayed a bill against infanticide Tuesday and said it “does not sound like compassion.”
Patient advocate Erika Christensen testified Tuesday at a born-alive hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., where she described how she and her husband flew out of New York to obtain a late-term abortion. She pointed out that if a born-alive act were in place at the time, doctors would have been forced to care for her baby instead of letting the baby die.
“This does not sound like compassion to me,” she said in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.
The hearing discussed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse reintroduced in 2019 after Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam suggested that a mother and doctor can decide, after a baby is born, to let the baby die, the National Review reported.
The New York patient advocate said that when her baby was 30 weeks old, her doctor told them that their baby had stopped growing.
“Our doctor explained to us that the fetus wasn’t able to swallow and that if we carried to term, I’d deliver a baby who couldn’t breathe and there was no care or treatment available that would change that,” she said.
Christensen and her husband decided they would abort their baby. “But then we learned we were past New York’s gestational limit, a line established by law, decades ago, by people who had never met me,” she said.
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Their doctor told them about a Colorado doctor who was a specialist in cases like Christensen’s, when the baby was past 30 weeks. Since an out-of-state abortion was not covered by their insurance, Christensen’s mother lent them funds out of her retirement fund to pay for the abortion.
“We felt incredibly lucky to have access to that money,” she explained.
“After it was all over my, husband and I felt both incredibly sad and incredibly relieved. Of course it is devastating when something you hope for, something you invest your literal life and blood into doesn’t work out,” the woman said.
“Terrible things can and do happen,” she continued.
Christensen added that “we will never be able to legislate away bad pregnancy outcomes,” but said that “we can control are the laws that punish us for them, or force us to make decisions we know are not best for us.”
She also emphasized that the born-alive bill would not “solve the problem.”
“It does not make anyone safer or healthcare better,” she said. “It does make terrible situations worse for grief stricken families in very specific circumstances who choose to hold their dying babies and say goodbye in peace.”
“Had I sought to end my pregnancy by early induction and this bill had been law, my doctors could have been required to commence extreme measures on a baby who could never breathe, regardless of the futility of such measures,” she added.
LifeNews Note: Mary Margaret Olohan writes for Daily Caller. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience.
