Astonishing Responses to a Live Birth

Live Action News has reported a situation in which a Family Planning Associates clinic in Arizona actually called 911 for help after a baby was born alive during an abortion. Live Action provides a link to local news coverage of the incident.

The news report bends over backwards to balance between abortion-rights and pro-life views on the incident, alternatively referring to the baby as a baby and as a fetus. The coverage also fairly represents what both sides had to say about the incident.

In the 911 calls, a clinic worker told the dispatcher a fetus that was removed had vital signs.

"There was a termination that was performed," the worker said. "There is a fetus that is breathing right now, so we need someone to do services."

The 911 operator asks if the fetus has been harmed in any way.

The worker answered no, and said the fetus needed further help other than what the clinic could provide.

"The fetus is breathing so we need care for it now," said the caller. "We can't provide that care except for oxygen and we're trying to keep the fetus stable until someone arrives."

There was an important omission or area of confusion in the report, which said, "According to documents, the doctor told police that she checked several times if the fetus had a heartbeat but didn't find one." The visual during that portion of the report is of the police report, the text of which indicates that the practitioner was listening for a heartbeat before the baby was born.

As the baby was being weighed, the police report indicates, a worker said, "Oh my god, this fetus is moving!"

According to reports, the baby died about five minutes after arrival at the hospital. The reports do not indicate whether the child was a boy or a girl. There is also no indication if the original estimate of the baby's age was accurate. This site addresses errors in estimating gestational age: "The accuracy of ultrasound in predicting gestational age gets worse as the pregnancy advances. By 20 weeks, ultrasound is accurate only to within plus or minus two weeks, and by the third trimester, its accuracy falls to plus or minus 3 weeks." 

According to this article, preemie survival rates on average are:

• 22 weeks: 0-10%
• 23 weeks: 10-35%
• 24 weeks: 40-70%
• 25 weeks: 50-80%
• 26 weeks: 80-90%
• 27 weeks: greater than 90%

Thus, even if the ultrasound was being read with due skill, the baby might well have been a 23-week baby with up to 35% chance of survival. In calling an ambulance, and evidently providing oxygen to the baby, the clinic was doing the right thing.

Of course, the pro-life response to such a happening is to stop aborting these babies in the first place. However, it seems common sense that if a facility is aborting potentially viable babies, they have a responsibility to be prepared for live births. At minimum, there should be means of keeping the baby safe and warm while administering oxygen, and a written emergency plan, reviewed as often as other emergency plans, for providing necessary support while awaiting an ambulance.

Overall, I find the events in Arizona staggering in that:

1. The clinic actually responded appropriately.
2. The news outlet even bothered to cover the incident.

Reprint: A Fetus With Attitude

Scary Stuff

Some things are just too scary to contemplate. For Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D-CO), like other abortion-advocating members of the House Judiciary Committee, there's nothing scarier than having a fetus speak about abortion.

I'm not talking about hallucinations or nightmares. If the Hon. Ms. Schroeder is visited by fetuses in her dreams or visions, she hasn't shared the news with the world at large. I'm talking about a real fetus: flesh and blood, targeted for an abortion, subjected to an abortion technique, somehow lived to tell the tale. And Ms. Schroeder would probably rather face a graveyard full of George Romero zombies than a single real human being who is alive despite its mother's attempt to abort it.

Ms. Schroeder did not express her reluctance to meet the fetus in terms of fear. No. Ms. Schroeder sent her regrets on the grounds that having a fetus speak on abortion is an underhanded attempt to "undermine the public’s consistent and overwhelming support for Roe v. Wade." Well, Ms. Schroeder, what do you expect? Consistent and overwhelming fetal support for Roe v. Wade?

The fetus said what anybody left with cerebral palsy from the toxic effects of abortion chemicals might be expected to say: that being aborted isn't very pleasant. That abortion wreaks havoc on fetuses. That fetuses, given their druthers, would rather be left unmolested. This should come as a surprise to nobody. And if Ms. Schroeder later developed an itching curiosity about exactly what a fetus would have to say about abortion, she could always read the transcript later.

Ms. Schroeder's refusal to hear the fetus speak was clearly a case of sticking to her guns. First, thanks to Roe v. Wade, the fetus was scalded with hypertonic saline, expelled prematurely, and left in a bedpan to die -- which was all good and proper as spelled out by the Constitution, right? No problem. But then something went wrong. Some nurse spirited the fetus away to a hospital nursery, whence it was adopted by some nutcase right-to-lifer who had enough of a fetish for fetuses to want one around the house. The fetus had multiple surgeries to enable it to walk. The fetus even learned to talk. The fetus became old enough to vote. Then the fetus had the unmitigated gall to speak to its elected officials. The nerve of some non-people!

The Nerve of Some Non-People!

Ms. Schroeder's outrage is understandable. The majority opinion in Roe v. Wade clearly stated, "The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a 'person' within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment." In other words, if a fetus is a person, you can't kill it. The whole foundation of Roe v. Wade would collapse like a house of cards if a fetus was able to demonstrate that it's a person. So when an aborted fetus limps up to the podium and reads its prepared comments, that's good news for fetuses, but bad news for somebody who gets campaign support from the abortion establishment.

This put Ms. Schroeder in a tight position. Since the fetus in question was sitting in a Congressional chamber rather than in Ms. Schroeder's uterus, The Hon. Ms. Schroeder had no Constitutional grounds for bringing in a qualified physician to complete the botched abortion and evacuate the troublesome fetus. Due to some grave judicial oversight, Blackmun et. al. had failed to allow for the proper disposal of ex-uterine fetuses with opinions of their own to express. Ms. Schroeder couldn't silence this fetus. But that didn't mean she had to listen to it.

Prolifers have always quipped that if fetuses could vote, abortion would quickly be outlawed. Well, after roughly thirty years of more-or-less unfettered abortion, some of the fetuses who slipped through the cracks have reached voting age. If we only count those who survived actual abortion attempts (rather than count all people under age 30, who gestated in a shooting gallery of sorts and are mightily lucky to have emerged alive) there are about 100,000 of them walking, limping, wheeling, or lying around (depending upon how badly injured they were by the abortion attempt), at large or in institutions of some kind here in the United States. Only about a third of them have reached voting age, so they're not much of a bloc for candidates to worry about in an election year.

But they've started speaking out. And that has abortion advocates shaking in their shoes. Because sooner or later some less-enlightened Supreme Court is likely to mistake them for people.

VERIFIED: Gosnell Got "Snipping" Idea at NAF Seminar

In an earlier post, "Snipping" and Why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell, I reiterated my theory that serial murderer / abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell got the idea of killing a baby by taking scissors to the back of its neck from Martin Haskell's D&X presentation paper to the National Abortion Federation.  In that presentation, Haskell taught this prestigious group of highly reputable providers how to use his new and improved abortion method. This method, like Gosnell's preferred method, involved getting the fetus out entirely in one piece. You might have heard this procedure referred to as "partial birth abortion."

Last night I stumbled across a bombshell: Verification of my suspicion that the similarity of technique was not mere coincidence. Gosnell himself, in an interview, said that he had attended that presentation and adapted his own variation of Haskell's technique.

My discovery began on YouTube, of all places, where I'd been looking for fresh approaches to the Gosnell story. I found this video, "Steve Volk Discusses his Interview With Dr. Kermit Gosnell."

Learning that Volk, a writer for Philadelphia Magazine, had access to Gosnell was an exciting development. Learning that an e-book was available about what he had learned from speaking to Gosnell whetted my appetite. I went straightway to Amazon.com, bought Gosnell's Babies,* and read it cover to cover. In its electronic pages, I found what I'd been looking for.

Martin Haskell's presentation paper from the NAF seminar

Gosnell, then, never questioned whether he should continue providing abortions. But after The Silent Scream, he did feel obligated to reduce the pain he caused. And he carried this thought around with him until 1992, when he saw Martin Haskell deliver one of the most controversial medical presentations in history, at a Dallas conference of abortion providers.

....

.... Haskell described a procedure in which the surgeon reaches into the uterus with a grasping forceps and pulls the fetus, limb by limb, into the vagina, until only the skull has yet to pass the cervix. As Haskell wrote: "The surgeon then forces ... scissors into the base of the skill," "spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening," and uses a suction cannula to "evacuate the skull contents." In layman's terms, the doctor stabs the fetus in the back of the neck at the base of the skull and uses a Karman cannula or catheter to suck out its brains

Gosnell then took Haskell's procedure and modified it to fit his own practice.

... Gosnell looked at this procedure in 1992 and saw an opportunity for mercy. In a technique he evolved over the years, he brought the tips of the scissors together, like a knife, to puncture the base of the fetus's neck. He widened the scissors to open the wound he created, revealing the spinal cord. And he severed that cord, believing this would end every sensation of the fetus, quickly and in the most humane manner possible.

Gosnell told Volk more about his use of the "snipping" technique. Just as Gosnell's staff reported to the Grand Jury, Gosnell reported to Volk that in response to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, Gosnell tried to comply, as other abortionists were doing, by injecting digoxin into the unborn baby's heart.

But even guided by ultrasound, he often seemed to miss. Sometimes, afterward, the fetus emerged, and...

The arm just jumped. Didn't it? The leg jerked. Isn't that baby ... breathing? And sometimes, one of his assistants asked: Is that baby alive?

No, he assured them. That wasn't a real movement.

During Gosnell's trial, the prosecutor asked a reputable abortion practitioner if other late-term doctors sometimes had a mishap with the lethal injection, leading to the birth of a live baby. She testified that yes, that does happen sometimes, and when it does the baby is provided with "comfort care." It is wrapped in a blanket, she said, and kept warm until it dies.

Illustration of the logistical difference
between an extraction abortion, promoted
by the National Abortion Federation, and
Gosnell's practice of "snipping."

A reality that became clear during the trial was difficult for Volk to come to grips with.

Even with babies at the legal point of viability, 24 weeks, if Gosnell had simply provided "comfort care" instead of snipping their necks, he would have faced nothing more than third-degree felony charges, potential seven-year sentences. The scissors he used because he took them to be "more merciful" are what made him a murderer.

For him, for us, the difference between being a doctor just doing his job and first-degree homicide was, first, a matter of geography: Did he kill the baby in utero, or outside the womb? And, second, a matter of execution: a 5.5-inch-long pair of surgical scissors, or a blanket and time?

Gosnell insisted to Volk, as his lawyer had insisted during the trial, that the babies were already dead before "snipping."And try as he might, Volk never got a satisfactory answer from Gosnell as to why, if the baby was already dead, any further action on his part was necessary.

He snipped the necks of dead babies, he claimed, merely to prevent any possible pain reception -- as if dead babies feel any pain at all.

I pressed him on this, explaining that it simply didn't seem credible for a medical doctor to be worrying about the pain experienced by a fetus he felt sure was dead. But Gosnell put me off, saying, "It will take me some time to articulate my answer." He never could explain himself. And his answers seemed carefully couched: "I never saw anything I took as fetal movement," he said.

In the end, the rationale for anything Kermit Gosnell did strikes one less as rationale than as rationalization. Running the pill mill was, in Gosnell's mind, providing poor people in the neighborhood with the chance to earn a living as drug dealers, thus stimulating the local economy. Operating a filthy facility was simply catering to an underprivileged clientele. A law banning outpatient abortions at or beyond 24 weeks, and mandating that any abortion at or beyond 24 weeks be justified with a "health" claim, was complied with fully by charting advanced pregnancies as exactly 24.5 weeks, mentally "rounding down" to 24 weeks, and reflecting that he'd want his own daughter to be able to obtain such an abortion. As for thrusting surgical scissors into the neck of a freshly-delivered baby, that was a merciful means of preventing pain.

As crazy as Gosnell's rationalizations sound, how different are they from the rationalizations that abortion apologists make? Far from being horrified at the idea of stabbing a nearly-delivered, living, moving baby in the back of the neck with scissors, the participants who watched a video of Haskell performing the procedure responded by giving him a standing ovation. And lest there be any doubt that the baby in question was moving, Haskell even joked that the baby often "helps" by wrapping its little arms and legs around the hand of the doctor that is about to kill it.

The abortion lobby went to bat big time in favor of the National Abortion Federation and its fully endorsed and enthusiastically promoted practice of stabbing the baby in the back of the neck just prior to completing a vaginal delivery. How can any of us pretend that a man who worked at a NAF clinic was doing something entirely different when he stabbed the baby in the back of the neck just after completing a vaginal delivery?

This schizophrenic rationalization needs to be exposed. Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are in the process of crowdfunding a TV movie that will bring the reality of abortion in America -- as exemplified in the practice of Kermit Gosnell -- to the largest possible audience. Go to Gosnell Movie and send a message. It need only cost you $1, less than the cup of a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. Tell the world that we're tired of letting this sort of thing go on utterly unexamined. Pray and spread the word. Support the Gosnell movie. End the silence.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read:

• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life 
• Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment 
• Gosnell: The One That Got Away, and Hope for Others 
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line? 
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why "Gosnell" Must be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told

*Steve Volk, Gosnell's Babies: Inside the Mind of America's Most Notorious Abortion Doctor, a Philadelphia Magazine E-Book, Metro Corp. 2013

Gosnell, Carhart, and the PBA Ban (Part 1)

Abortionist Carhart

The Kermit Gosnell verdict and Live Action's release of the Carhart video offer us a chance to reflect on how the Partial Birth Abortion (PBA) Ban changed and didn't change abortion practice.

Let's have a brief refresher.

Before Roe: 

Post-viability abortions are at their core a nonsensical concept. Pick up any dictionary and you'll find that "abortion" is defined as the death of the fetus prior to viability. All pregnancies end. A pregnancy with an "abortive outcome" ended before the baby could survive outside the womb. This abortive outcome could be natural (a miscarriage) or induced by deliberately killing a living fetus. Once the fetus had passed the developmental age of viability, the outcome of the pregnancy is by definition a birth -- either a live birth or a stillbirth. But in 1973, a group of non-physicians handed down a decision called Roe vs. Wade which decreed that logic be damned, language be damned,  medicine be damned, if somebody wanted to kill a fetus at any point in the pregnancy, legally that act of killing would be lumped in under "abortion" and it would be enshrined as a right.

Tinkering Around

With this new permission to kill any fetus they wanted to kill, abortionists tinkered around. They took the two basic ways of getting a viable fetus out of the mother -- induced labor and a c-section -- and modified them to make sure that the end result would not be a live baby. Those who preferred to induce labor would do something prior to inducing labor to make sure the baby would come out dead. In the era before ultrasounds allowed an abortionist to guide a needle to the fetal heart or brain to do a lethal injection, this was done by injecting poison into the amniotic fluid. If labor induction failed, or if for some reason time was of the essence, a hysterotomy would be performed -- which is just a c-section with the intent of delivering a dead baby.

The Problem

Both of these approaches to the newly-minted post-viability abortion, however, had one serious drawback. Fetuses can be remarkably tenacious of life. You can want them dead, but they can thwart your plans by failing to die. This is known as the "dreaded complication." (Interesting that the "dreaded complication" isn't a dead mother but a live baby. What other medical procedure considers life itself to be both dreaded and a complication?)

There are two standard approaches to the dreaded complicaton:

1. The Obama Approach: Pronounce that since you'd made the decision to go ahead with an abortion, the fetus is by definition not viable regardless of his or her actual gestational age, size, health status, and condition upon delivery. He or she is to be stashed with the more cooperative -- and hence dead -- fetuses in the utility room or biohazard bag or wherever you choose to put them. Just pretend the whole ugly little business with the pulse and the breathing and the movement and the gasping and the crying never happened.
2. The Gosnell Approach: "Ensure fetal demise" after the baby is delivered. This is much quicker and more certain.

The problem with both of these approaches is that they leave you open to a third possibility:

• The Oh Shit I'm Gonna Get My Ass Sued Off Now Approach: Some idiot nurse rescues the baby and you curse the day you let that interfering bitch anywhere near your patient.

To most people, the How About We Don't Abort the Baby in the First Place Approach seems like an obvious solution. In fact, most abortionists decided that this is a good approach, at least for their own personal practices.* But some abortionists were more bold and intrepid. They weren't about to be cowed by some three-pound conglomeration of pregnancy tissue! And leading the charge was a stalwart fellow from Orange County, California. His name was James McMahon, and he was determined that if the person "who owns the child" wants it dead, then he would achieve that death, for a sizeable fee, whatever the great  personal cost to himself!

*I find it fascinating that although the abortion lobby fights to force all ob/gyns to perpetrate abortions whether they want to do them or not, there is no concerted effort to force existing abortion practitioners to do late abortions whether they want to do them or not. Bizarre, no?