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.

Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line?

Kermit Gosnell

Last year Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of murder in the deaths of three of the hundreds of newborn babies he had killed by severing their spines while their mothers lay nearby, overdosed to the brink of death by his accomplices.

Whether Gosnell was guilty of murder hinged on the question of whether he had done the killing before or after the baby had fully emerged from the birth canal.

Gosnell's attorney, Jack McMahon, argued that these killings were perfectly ordinary abortions that accomplished what Gosnell was paid to do, which was whatever was necessary to make sure that the viable unborn baby was rendered lifeless before it left the mother's body.

All of this was so gruesome that even Gosnell's attorney walked away from the trial convinced that the legal limits for abortion should be pushed back to perhaps 16 weeks to prevent any more viable infants from being killed

The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act places the limit for on-demand abortion at 24 weeks. Is that early enough in the pregnancy to prevent the killing of an unborn baby that could survive if born alive and provided with care? We can start by looking at the preemie survival rates at Preemie.web:

22 weeks:   0-10% survival rate

23 weeks: 10-35% survival rate

24 weeks: 40-70% survival rate

25 weeks: 50-80% survival rate

26 weeks: 80-90% survival rate

27 weeks:   > 90% survival rate

At first blush, one might think that setting the cutoff at 22 weeks would do the job. However, we have to take another factor into account.  Military Obstetrics & Gynecology 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."

Ultrasound is the most common method of estimating gestational age in abortion practice. Many women are going in for late abortions because they'd lost track of their cycles and weren't sure they were pregnant at all, so dating from the woman's last menstrual period isn't an option. The doctors are having to rely almost entirely on ultrasound.

Here are some cases of abortion doctors miscalculating gestation age: a supposedly 21-week baby who turned out to be 30 weeks, a supposedly 11-week baby that turned out to be 27 weeks, a baby that was believed to be about 12 weeks and turned out to be 28 weeks, and a supposedly 6-week baby that turned out to be 26 weeks. I'll recognize, however, that these are unusual screw-ups. I'll just focus on being within the margin of error for a doctor who is taking reasonable care.

With the range of error of properly performed ultrasounds, a "22 week" baby with an estimated 10% or less chance of survival may just as readily be a 20 week baby with no chance of survival or a 24 week baby with a 40-70% chance of survival. An estimated 20 week baby might only be 18 weeks but might be a 22 week baby with a survival rate of up to 10%.

This clinic advertises to 28+ weeks.

Different states vary at where they draw the line. In some states, there is no gestational age limit at all for on-demand abortions. The only limit is how late in the pregnancy the doctor is willing to kill the baby. some facilities openly advertise elective abortions past 28 weeks -- babies that have a greater than 95% chance of survival, and who may actually be three weeks older than estimated. They might be as old as 31 weeks, as likely to survive as a term infant, albeit with intensive support during the first weeks after birth.

Thus, the current state of medical care and ultrasound skill means that to avoid aborting a viable infant, the legal cut-off must be at 20 weeks.


Of course, regardless of gestational age, if you sever their spinal cords they have a 0% chance of survival. 

Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have launched a crowdfunding effort to produce a movie about Gosnell's crimes.  Bringing the story of Kermit Gosnell out before as large an audience as possible can move this country toward an awareness of the vulnerability of viable unborn babies.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read (and don't forget to tweet!):

• Verified: Gosnell Got Snipping Idea at NAF Seminar
• 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 &  Hope for Others
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder 
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• "Snipping" and why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told
• Why "Gosnell" Must Be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect

Gosnell, Carhart, and the PBA Ban (Part 4)

In Part 1, I gave some background on post-viability abortions, which were invented by the Supreme Court in 1973. In Part 2, I described the advent of the procedure that came to be known as Partial Birth Abortion. In Part 3, I looked at how the Partial Birth Abortion Ban changed -- albeit only temporarily -- the practice of Philadelphia quack Kermit Gosnell.

Today I'll look at how the ban changed the practice of LeRoy "Meat in a Crock Pot" Carhart.

When Carhart (pictured) challenged the Partial Birth Abortion ban, he testified about what was then his standard abortion practice. Carhart indicated that he tried to grab the baby and get it positioned to where he could suck out the brain without taking the baby apart first. But sometimes, he indicated, the baby would stick a limb out through the cervix, and it was just easier to pull that part off and go from there:

Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.

Question: How do you go about dismembering that extremity?

Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your counter-traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can’t get the other leg out.

Question: In that situation, are you, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?

Carhart: Yes.

Question: Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus?

Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.

Question: And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?

Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.

Question: At what point is the fetus...does the fetus die during that process?

Carhart: I don’t really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.

When Live Action did an undercover investigation of Carhart recently, he had changed his approach, using a digoxin injection into the baby's heart to make sure that it was dead before he even started the procedure:

Woman: So I'll have a dead baby in me?

Carhart: For three days, yeah.

Woman: Will it start to decompose or something:

Carhart: No. It's like putting meat in a Crock Pot, OK? 

So the PBA ban got Carhart to change the method he used for killing the baby. While we can assume that it's painful for the baby to have a large-bore needle stuck through its chest into its beating heart, that is surely less painful than being dismembered alive and conscious, able to move and put a limb out through the mother's cervix. Though the ban didn't save these babies' lives, it did provide them with a somewhat more merciful death.

Carhart also indicated to the Live Action investigator that he was careful to follow the law. He did not break the Nebraska law by perpetrating abortions past the legal limit, but instead had those patient travel to Maryland, where he could legally perform elective abortions through 26 weeks. Left to himself, Carhart is not a lawbreaker.

He did, however, perpetrate illegal third-trimester abortions in Kansas while he was working for infamous late-term abortionist George Tiller. Carhart perpetrated the illegal third-trimester abortion that killed Christin Gilbert (pictured). However, Tiller was able to maintain a clinic where such illegal abortions were openly perpetrated because of his tremendous political clout. He had no less a personage than the Governor protecting him. Carhart evidently has not on his own initiate cultivated such relationships in the states where he is practicing now. Whether he would do so if abortion were banned entirely is open to speculation.

Odds are that Carhart could be kept in check by clearly written laws that distinguished between direct abortion (deliberately killing the baby) and indirect abortion (performing a procedure necessary to protect the mother's live but which necessitated delivering the baby prior to viability). The law would have to include clear and severe penalties for deliberately killing the baby. This would make it extremely difficult for even the Governor to get the doctor out of trouble if a local prosecutor went after the lawbreaker. 

Carhart's age (he was born in 1941) makes it likely that were his livelihood to be taken away, he would just retire. However, is is a tireless advocate for abortion -- particularly post-viability abortions -- so he would still be trying to pull political strings and would have to be monitored and thwarted in his efforts to remove protection from unborn babies and their vulnerable mothers.

Gosnell, Carhart, and the PBA Ban (Part 3)

In Part 1, I gave some background on post-viability abortions, which were invented by the Supreme Court in 1973. In Part 2, I described the advent of the procedure that came to be known as Partial Birth Abortion. 

Now let's look at the ban and what it meant for abortion practitioners.

A trained eye can see the impact of Martin Haskell's "D&X" presentation paper all over the Kermit Gosnell Grand Jury Report. After all, sticking a scissors in the base of a living baby's skull to kill it didn't originate with Gosnell. In fact, the Grand Jury Report itself says:
At one point in his Grand Jury testimony, Kermit Gosnell employee Steve Massof "tried to suggest that the clinic’s practice of cutting babies’ spinal cords was somehow part of a late-term procedure called intact dilation and extraction (IDX), commonly referred to as 'partial birth abortion' and banned under federal law since 2007."

That Gosnell saw what he was doing as a modified PBA is clearer when we come to another employee's testimony:

Kareema Cross testified that when she first started working at the clinic, in 2005, Gosnell slit the neck of every baby. But he subsequently told the workers that the law changed so that he could not do that anymore. .... Cross said that Gosnell then tried a few times to use a new procedure: He tried to inject a drug called digoxin into the fetus’s heart while it was in the womb. This was supposed to cause fetal demise in utero. But because Gosnell was not skillful enough to successfully administer digoxin, late-term babies continued to be born alive, and he continued to kill them by slitting their necks.

Clearly Gosnell was trying to work inside the law. He tried to modify his practice to be in compliance as he understood it, even though he was violating other laws left and right. 

While the Partial Birth Abortion Ban did at least result in an attempt to change procedures to something that would be slightly less painful for the baby, in Gosnell's case at least it ultimately had no effect. What's more had Gosnell managed to kill the baby while it was only partially born, he would have only been guilty of violating the Abortion Control Act, and not guilty of murder.

When Roe falls, the laws will have to be tightened up so that there will be no chance of an abortionist weaseling around.