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Normal People Love their Babies. If a baby is found abandoned all decent people want to help. If a child is ill you will do what it takes to help him or her get healthy.

What kind of a monster would abandon a new born baby to lay alone, unloved . . . To die of thirst, hunger and cold. What kind of a cold-blooded fiend would make it against the law to save that baby’s life . . . Or even hold it, to give it warmth, sing to her or him, to let the baby someone cares and wants to provide some mercy in this condemned baby’s all too short life.

The induced labor abortion procedure can be performed using a couple different medications, but the goal always is to cause a pregnant woman's cervix to open so that she will deliver a premature baby who dies during the birth process or soon afterward. At Christ Hospital the physician inserts a medication called Cytotec into the mother's birth canal next to the cervix. The cervix is the opening at the bottom of the uterus that normally stays closed until a mother is about 40 weeks pregnant and ready to deliver. But Cytotec irritates the cervix and stimulates it to open early.  When this happens, the pre-term baby drops out of the uterus, sometimes alive.

In the event that a baby is aborted alive at Christ Hospital, he or she is not given any medical care, but is rather given what my hospital calls “comfort care." “Comfort care” is defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until the baby dies, although until recently even this was not always done. The baby is then offered to the parents to hold until he or she dies.

If the parents do not want to hold their dying aborted baby, as is most often the case, it is left to nursing staff or support staff on the floor to hold the baby until he or she dies.  And, until this past December, when staff did not have time or the desire to hold the baby, the baby was taken to our Soiled Utility Room and left there alone to die.  Christ Hospital's comfort care policy, #WHS492, only requires that live aborted babies be checked for signs of life once an hour, or “as needed in order to verify time of death.”

It is not uncommon for a live aborted babies to linger for an hour or two or even longer.   At Christ Hospital, one of these babies once lived for almost an entire eight-hour shift.  Last year alone, of the 13 babies that I am aware of who were aborted at Christ Hospital, at least four lived between 1-1/2 to 3 hours, two boys and two girls. Christ Hospital says that it compassionately aborts babies with very serious mental or physical handicaps.  But Christ Hospital will also abort for life or health of the mother.  So at least two of the second-trimester babies who were aborted last year, for instance, were completely healthy.

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.

Other coworkers have told me about incidences of live aborted babies whom they have cared for. A Support Associate told me about a live aborted baby who was left to die on the counter of the Soiled Utility Room, wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown into the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the baby, the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor. A nursing coworker told me about an incident she was involved in last spring that she said “I just can't stop thinking about." She participated in the abortion of a healthy 23-1/7 week baby who was given no medical assessments or care after delivery, but was allowed to languish for 2-1/2 hours until she died, even though she showed early signs of thriving.

Nurse's Testimony shocks Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee

SPRINGFIELD, IL, March 27, 2001 (RFM NEWS)  EXCLUSIVE  RFM News has exclusively obtained a written transcript of Nurse Jill Stanek's written testimony before the Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act.  Stanek, a labor and delivery nurse at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, was first to expose an abortion procedure which many are calling "live-birth abortion."

I am a Registered Nurse who has worked in the Labor & Delivery Department at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, for the past 5-1/2 years. Christ Hospital performs abortions during the second and even third trimesters of pregnancy.

The abortion method being called into question that Christ Hospital and other Illinois hospitals practice is called “induced labor abortion." This abortion technique sometimes results in infants being aborted alive. In the event that an infant is aborted alive at Christ Hospital, she or he is given no medical assessments or care whatsoever, but is left to die.