ABORTION is an emotive matter. The self-styled pro-lifers would rather have any life over abotion, however tragic and miserable for mother and child - however much the birth ruins lives.
But what can be made of aborted babies born alive and screaming?
Eighteeen and pregnant, Sycloria Williams went to an abortion clinic outside Miami and paid $1,200 for Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique to terminate her 23-week pregnancy. Three days later, she sat in a reclining chair, medicated to dilate her cervix and otherwise get her ready for the procedure.Only Renelique didn’t arrive in time. According to Williams and the Florida Department of Health, she went into labor and delivered a live baby girl.
What Williams and the Health Department say happened next has shocked people on both sides of the abortion debate: One of the clinic’s owners, who has no medical license, cut the infant’s umbilical cord. Williams says the woman placed the baby in a plastic biohazard bag and threw it out.
Police recovered the decomposing remains in a cardboard box a week later after getting anonymous tips.
The AP reports that “the case has riled the anti-abortion community, which contends the clinic’s actions constitute murder.”
It sound very much like it is murder, this too:
Consider the death in 1998 of Jessica Jane, whose mother decided she wanted no baby to interrupt her career. Jessica Jane was just 22 weeks old when she was aborted – alive. She was placed in a stainless steel dish by a horrified midwife and left in a room, where she cried until she died, alone, 80 minutes later…
Someone cleaning up after an abortion in Sydney’s Westmead in 1998 found a baby, still alive, in a bin. The coroner in that case, too, said she’d been told “many terminated fetus live after they are expelled from the mother”.
Gianna Jessen was aborted as a baby. She lived. She lives with her cerebral palsy.Says she:
“If abortion is about women’s rights, then what were my rights?”
Overall:
One in 30 babies aborted for medical reasons is born alive, a study has found.
In the UK:
A GOVERNMENT agency is launching an inquiry into doctors’ reports that up to 50 babies a year are born alive after botched National Health Service abortions.
The investigation, by the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH), comes amid growing unease among clinicians over a legal ambiguity that could see them being charged with infanticide.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which regulates methods of abortion, has also mounted its own investigation.
A zygote, a few cells, is not a person. But a flesh and blood breathing thing… Well, what else can it be? And what would you do as a medic faced with a life aborted birth?
Posted: 11th, February 2009 | In: Key Posts, Media Comments (36) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Comments
- percy stilton on I’m A Celebrity: Katie Price Is Rubbed Off In Kim Woodburn Bust Up
- Alan bernard Brazil on Will Ferrell Tops List Of Hollywood’s Top Ten Overpaid Stars
- percy stilton on I’m A Celebrity: Katie Price Is Rubbed Off In Kim Woodburn Bust Up
- Perry Mason on I’m A Celebrity: Jan Moir Is The Daily Mail’s Katie Price
- yetunde on Man Finds Stable Relationship With Sex Dolls Kelly And Brooke
February 18th, 2009 at 12:24 am
June,
I agree; a lot of alleged grown ups are not exactly setting a good example of how to behave.
I did think of writing something about the way that the abortion debate is derailed by people with very large axes to grind, but you will probably be relieved to be spared my analysis of the stastical data on terminations in this country.
Instead I’ll provide a link to Ben Goldacre’s article:
‘Meaningful debates need clear information’
He does a wonderful hatchet job on the doctor John Wyatt who published research claiming vast improvements had been made in the survival of very premature babies, with the knock-on claim that the upper limit of termination- generally 24 weeks- should be reduced.
Wyatt, a leading light in the Christian Medical Fellowship, produced research flatly contradicting all the other research on the topic, which seems pretty strange, until you realise that he had hit upon the clever ruse of excluding all the really sick premature babies from his claims. Which kind of defeats the object of the exercise of measuring differences in the survival rates of premature babies, and some people might even think it was deliberately misleading…
Do read, and enjoy, Ben Goldacre’s piece at Bad Science:
http://www.badscience.net/2007/10/557/
I must to bed; goodnight all!
February 18th, 2009 at 12:23 am
February 17th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Chenier
I saw the line that AP may open results on live tv.
Apart from the newborn, for whom I feel desperately sorry ,the young parents have far too much to learn far too quickly, and I do feel Alfie is going to be seriously let down.
Life’s lessons for adults foisted upon kids
February 17th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
June
The latest headline in the Times is:
‘Social services deny paying for Alfie Patten’s DNA test’
which gives us a good idea of the level of the discussion; along with the Telegraph’s headline
‘Alfie Patten may open DNA test results on live television ‘
No doubt the editors of both papers will be assuring the PCC’s inquiry that their coverage is obviously in the public interest, unlike those nasty tabloid abusers of lost innocence, but they are clearly unwilling, or unable, to exercise any self-restraint when it comes to increasing the circulation figures.
At least the teenagers have the excuse that they are teenagers….
February 17th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Horrified,
Sometimes its only until a pregnancy is past 20 weeks that the doctors and mother find there is a serious life affecting problem with the baby, and the sad option is to end it, BUT they must ensure the infant is dead before inducing labour.
But the other side of the coin when its for purely social reasons, and the child is just unwanted is sickening, but its likely the mother will abuse it of she goes full term.
But in this day and age of birth control this shouldn’t be an option.
February 17th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
I think it is abslutely disgraceful that people decide half way through their pregnancy that they no longer want the child. As a mother myself, I have to say the stories are heart wrenching.. They are selfish evil people and deserve to have the right to have a child taken away from them.
To leave a baby that depends on you for everything, to cry and slowly die in a room alone is absolutely disgusting and the people that allowed that should be sent to prison for life to rot!
I am absolutely sickened
February 17th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
I still don’t understand why they fertilise all the eggs obtained, and how many of the 8 will make it to healthy adult hood,or even childhood.
I did notice the pro-life mob did say they thought the parents were courageous in opting for birth, wonder if they understood to even make a decision.
I just hope Social services are heavily involved in the older sets of parents, who should know better
(They aren’t even bankers either…..)
February 17th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Odd, isn’t it.
Egged on by the media, the ‘pro-life’ are talking the 8 babies up as the moral thing to do with all those embryos, just as they are talking up having a baby at 15 as being the moral thing to do, irrespective of 8 possible fathers.
But people are making lots and lots of money out of it, so it must be alright…
February 17th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
‘only septuplets’…….how used have we become to large whelpings ,sorry births
February 17th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
But the octuplets were supposed to be only septuplets, so the ‘my baby’ may be a simple imaging error…
February 17th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Chenier it says ‘my baby’ not ‘my litter’……
February 17th, 2009 at 11:25 am
I hope not;particularly if it’s octuplets…
February 17th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Is it just me or is that woman’s bump growing and kicking?
February 12th, 2009 at 7:44 am
The woman in question is heartless. Imagine having her as a mother.
February 12th, 2009 at 4:24 am
June
I don’t know much about the abortion stats (although officially I am in our local pro-life group - I never remember all the stuff we get told, it’s too gruesome and depressing), I was just recalling a conversation I had with a politico. She voted not to reduce the time limit.
While it’s left-wing to be pro-choice and right-wing to be pro-life I don’t the state will give an inch. We’ll have to wait till the debate gets more flexible.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
I see; all is now clear. The This is London article is dated for today at the top, but underneath it has:
Last updated at 23:52pm on 19.04.07
Bit of a slow news day today, Anorak?
February 11th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Oh, and the bit above about
‘A GOVERNMENT agency is launching an inquiry into doctors’ reports that up to 50 babies a year are born alive after botched National Health Service abortions’
is taken from a Sunday Times headline.
Dated .November 27, 2005
February 11th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
As I recall we had this debate a couple of years ago on the Forum. It is a very emotional and heated issue re late stage abortions for both Pro-choice and Pro-lifers. Over here late term abortions are banned.
This isn’t what I was truly looking for but the below gives us a refresher course in the stages of the fetus’ development in real pictures. I wasn’t after the commentary below the pictures, so that you can really skip once you look at the real pictures and decide for yourself at what stage of development should those fetuses you’ll look at not be aborted and at what stage it becomes ‘murder’, depending on one’s views of late term abortions.
http://www.aboutabortions.com/EmbFetal.htm
February 11th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Not only is there nothing to be found, at least by me, in the current and last month’s issue of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, but Google’s health stories have nothing on it.
Curious and curiouser…
February 11th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I cant help but think that the 4 photos at the top have a sublinimal message for us
February 11th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
But if a woman has the right to control her own body, then surely she must face up to the responsibility, after all who allowed the pregnancy, who thought she didn’t want it and then who thought she did - and hardly a welcome for a child and that really could be traumatic
February 11th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Sorry, don’t know much about abortions and regulations.
Isn’t twelve weeks considered as the most dangerous period to have an spontaneous abortion? So why not lower the 25 weeks to 12 [for the 'on demand' abortions] and for women who’s live is in danger or for baby’s with serious birth defects/serious disabilitiies leave it as it is, but it has to be done in a hospital, not in an abortion clinic.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
On Eastenders recently I was suprised how easy it is. One tablet on one day, another the next and bobs your uncle.
What is bad though is in the intervening 24hours and a change of heart, and the damaging trauma that causes.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Well, I’ve worked my way through the January and February editions of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology without success; I can’t find a study on abortion at all, much less the one cited by This is London.
Perhaps someone else could try checking it?
http://www.bjog.org/view/0/currentIssue.html
February 11th, 2009 at 10:50 am
But we all know it is on demand in the early weeks……..
February 11th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Karen,
Do you know the figures for abortions because the child is damaged and quality of life would be abysmal and abortion because the mother to be is twat and forgot to take her pill/ use a condom/changed her mind?
A friend of ours in the US had a very late abortion, the baby had a fatal heart defect and wouldn’t have survived its first breath, but the medics did make sure it was delivered as a still birth.
Why is it we still think of abortion as somewhat seedy and back street?
February 11th, 2009 at 10:45 am
coolandcalm
Abortion isn’t meant to be on demand - the way the act is worded - so if they said ‘medical reasons only after x weeks’ - they’d be admitting that it was on demand before x weeks (I think).
Babies die so we don’t have to tell the truth (I suppose).
February 11th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Karen, agreed about the medical side but the majority of terminations are not on medical grounds…. Choice and Medical should be judged separately. IMO of course!
February 11th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Coolandcalm
A family friend is an MSP - she says it’s not possible because of the scan issue (she was involved in the debate recently - she was on Newsnight and everything - a career first - although it was just the Scottish version and I forgot to watch).
February 11th, 2009 at 10:12 am
This is truly sickening. How could anyone leave a little person to die like that is so way beyond me I don’t think i’ve got enough brain capacity to actually comprehend it…
February 11th, 2009 at 10:12 am
With medical knowledge so much more advanced I think the time limit for terminations should be reduced to 9 weeks except for exceptional circs, eg if there is no possiblilty of life after birth.
Pregnancy tests can now tell you’re pregnant within a few days and foetus viability is down to around 21 weeks…. times change, so IMO should the termination limits.