Nurse Jill Stanek knows that babies sometimes survive abortions and are abandoned to die without even basic medical care.
Two decades ago, while working as an RN at Christ Hospital in Illinois, she held one of them, a tiny baby boy who clung to life for 45 minutes before he died in her arms, she told a U.S. Senate committee on Tuesday.
The Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony about the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a Republican-backed bill to require doctors to provide basic medical care to babies who survive abortions.
Stanek said Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s comments last year about abortion survivors “hit painfully close to home for me.” Northam, a doctor, basically supported infanticide in 2019 when he said babies who survive abortions could be left to die without medical treatment if that is what the doctors and parents decide.
Stanek said she knows from personal experience that what Northam said does happen. When she worked at Christ Hospital, she said several babies survived second- and third-trimester abortions, and some of them lived for several hours. She said the babies “were allowed to die without any medical care or intervention whatsoever.”
One night, “I cared for a dying baby who was on the other side of this decision,” she said.
Another nurse was taking him to a “soiled utility room because she did not have time to hold him and his parents didn’t want to have anything to do with him,” she told the senators.
“I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone, so I rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived,” she said. “He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about half a pound, and was about the size of my hand.”
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In another case that Stanek learned of while working at the hospital, she said: “[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.”
Former nurse @JillStanek shared a story about a baby she witnessed who was born alive after an abortion and left to die.
Just heartbreaking.
We MUST end abortion.
We MUST end infanticide#WednesdayWisdom #WednesdayMotivationpic.twitter.com/PI8wHhOgj9
— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) February 12, 2020
Though those happened two decades ago, Stanek said babies still survive abortions all across America. Health data backs up her remarks.
Though babies’ survivals have been called “imaginary” and protections for them unnecessary, state health statistics indicates that at least 40 babies were born alive after botched abortions in just three states between 2016 and 2018. According to the state health data, 11 babies were born alive after botched abortions in Minnesota, 10 in Arizona and 19 in Florida.
Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as the personal testimonies of nurses and abortion survivors themselves, also provide evidence that babies survive abortions. According to the CDC, at least 143 babies were born alive after botched abortions between 2003 and 2014 in the U.S., though there likely are more.
Research by the American Center for Law and Justice estimated the number is much higher, at least 362 between 2001 and 2010.
Currently, about 18 states do not have laws to protect abortion survivors from infanticide. Some states never have passed laws to protect abortion survivors, while at least two others, New York and Illinois, repealed their laws requiring medical care for infants who survive abortions.
In 2019, Texas passed a law strengthening protections for infants who survive abortions. West Virginia is very close to passing a similar bill this winter.
Last year, the state legislatures in Montana, North Carolina and Wisconsin nearly passed bills to protect born-alive infants as well; however, their Democratic governors vetoed the legislation. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers claimed the legislation was “not a productive use of time.”
LifeNews Note: File photo.
