Often when a baby is born alive during an abortion procedure, the child is kept in the abortion clinic until he or she dies. In rare cases, the abortionist himself takes action to kill the baby. But sometimes the baby is transferred to a hospital, where he can be given medical care. Unfortunately, it is the policy of many hospitals simply to allow these babies to die.
Nurse Kathleen Malloy, from Jacksonville, Florida, witnessed the death of one baby who was born after a saline abortion and transferred to her hospital. Melanie Green of Last Days Ministries quoted Malloy in her pamphlet “Children: Things We Throw Away?“Malloy tells her story:
I worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, and when we weren’t busy, I’d go out to help with the newborns. One night I saw a bassinet outside the nursery. There was a baby in this bassinet – a crying, perfectly formed baby – but there was a difference in this child. She had been scalded. She was the child of a saline abortion.This little girl looked as if she had been put in a pot of boiling water. No doctor, no nurse, no parent, to comfort this hurt, burned child. She was left alone to die in pain. They wouldn’t let her in the nursery – they didn’t even bother to cover her.I was ashamed of my profession that night! It’s hard to believe this can happen in our modern hospitals, but it does. It happens all the time. I thought a hospital was a place to heal the sick – not a place to kill.I asked a nurse at another hospital what they do with their babies that are aborted by saline. Unlike my hospital, where the baby was left alone struggling for breath, their hospital puts the infant in a bucket and puts the lid on. Suffocation! Death by suffocation!
A saline abortion is performed by injecting the caustic saline solution into the amniotic fluid that surrounds an unborn baby in the second trimester. The baby breathes in the fluid, which burns her lungs and scorches her skin, causing her to die within several hours. The mother then goes through labor to give birth to the dead baby. This type of abortion is seldom performed today because it led to so many live births and because it was dangerous to women; it had the potential to cause severe damage to the woman’s body if the saline was injected into her bloodstream. A similar procedure where poison is injected into the baby’s heart, or, in some cases, the amniotic fluid, still takes place today and is used in the late second and third trimesters.
The baby Malloy watched die never had a name and never had a chance to live. In a similar situation, Gianna Jessen, who was also aborted by the saline method, was given medical care and survived. She is now a pro-life activist, and her website can be found here.
A 2002 article in The Journal of Clinical Nursing seems to indicate that nurses encounter babies born alive after abortions with some frequency. According to the article:
In the case of late termination, the death of the fetus before delivery, though usual, is not inevitable except in rare cases of extreme physical abnormality[.] … At times the fetus will actually attempt to breathe or move its limbs, which makes the experience extremely distressing for nurses. Also, whereas the woman will probably go through this process once in her lifetime, nurses may go through it several times a year or even in the same week. (1)
The article quotes author and lecturer Annette D. Huntington, BN, Ph.D. saying that abortion live births are a “regular occurrence.”
Another nurse who found herself in the terrible position of caring for an aborted baby told her story in the newsletter of Friendship Pregnancy Center (now called Women’s First Choice Center) in Morristown, New Jersey. Her story, which can be read in its entirety here, is heartbreaking. On the night the aborted baby came in, three premature babies from a nearby hospital were being taken care of. Two of the three were in danger of dying, and doctors struggled to save their lives. While the doctors were engaged in the struggle to help these two wanted babies, the aborted baby was brought in:
The nurse from Labor and Delivery walked into our unit carrying a blanket and stating “This is a prostaglandin abortion. He has a heartbeat so we brought him over.” The baby was placed under a radiant warmer and I was told the rest of the facts. The gestational age of the baby was given to be 23 weeks by ultrasound. The mother had cancer and had received chemotherapy treatments before discovering that she was pregnant. The parents had been told that their baby would be horribly deformed because of the chemotherapy.I looked at the baby boy lying before me, and saw that from all appearances he was perfect. He had a good strong heartbeat. I could tell this without using a stethoscope because I could see his chest moving in sync with his heart rate. With a stethoscope I heard a heart pumping strongly. I look at his size and his skin — he definitely looked more mature than 23 weeks. He was weighed and I discovered that he was 900 grams, almost two pounds. This was almost twice the weight of some babies we have been able to save. A doctor was summoned. When she arrived the baby started moving his tiny arms and legs flailing. He started trying to gasp, but was unable to get air into his lungs. His whole body shuddered with his efforts to breathe. We were joined by a neonatalist and I pleaded with both doctors saying, “The baby is viable — look at his size, look at his skin — he looks much older than 23 weeks.”
