In an undercover video released in April 2013, a D.C. abortionist admitted he would not intervene to save an abortion survivor. When asked about a baby being born alive during an attempted abortion, he said, “usually, at this point in your pregnancy, it’s too early to survive, usually. It will expire shortly after birth…it’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.” Later he said, “we would not help it [the baby]. Let’s say. We wouldn’t—we wouldn’t—uh, intubate, let’s say.”
In another undercover video released in March 2017, a former Planned Parenthood medical director said that in order to determine whether to provide medical intervention for these babies, “You need to pay attention to who’s in the room.”
A Planned Parenthood lobbyist in 2013 opposed the Infants Born Alive Act in Florida, saying, “We believe that, you know, any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.” Abortion advocates leapt to the lobbyist’s defense, targeting the Infants Born Alive Act’s “fundamentally flawed assumption that this type of situation is a real risk” and asserting that born-alive infants were “incredibly unlikely.” However, since 2013 when the Act was signed into law, 42 babies have been born alive during abortions in Florida.
In a 2019 interview with WTOP in Washington, D.C., in which he endorsed a permissive late-term abortion bill, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam dismissed concerns about abortions performed while a woman is giving birth, explaining, “The infant would be delivered; the infant would be kept comfortable; the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desire, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
Abortion survivor Melissa Ohden testified to the House Judiciary Committee in 2015, “You wouldn’t know it by looking at me today, but in August of 1977, I survived a failed saline infusion abortion…. I know where children like me were left to die at St. Luke’s Hospital—a utility closet. In 2014, I met a nurse who assisted in a saline infusion abortion there in 1976, and delivered a living baby boy. After he was delivered alive, she followed her superior’s orders and placed him in the utility closet in a bucket of formaldehyde to be picked up later as medical waste after he died there, alone.”
Gianna Jessen, another adult survivor of abortion, also testified to the House Judiciary Committee in 2015, stating, “I was delivered alive in an abortion clinic in Los Angeles on April the 6th, 1977. My medical records state: ‘Born alive during saline abortion’ at 6 am. Thankfully, the abortionist was not at work yet. Had he been there, he would have ended my life with strangulation, suffocation, or leaving me there to die.”
Many young survivors have grown up and chosen to go public with their stories. The testimonies of individuals who were born alive during abortions are featured on https://abortionsurvivors.org/. A Fox News interview with Ohden and two other abortion survivors, one of whom testifies he lost an arm in the process, aired on February 11, 2019.
Late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell flouted Pennsylvania law for years before suspicion of the illegal sale of drugs caused the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration to raid his “House of Horrors” in 2010. Most disturbing among what they found was evidence of the intentional killing of babies who had survived Gosnell’s abortion procedures. These “snippings,” as he called them, involved using a scissors to sever the spine of babies who survived his brutal abortions.
In 2005, a mother delivered her 23-week-old baby in the toilet at EPOC Clinic in Orlando, Florida, and was shocked to see him move. Abortion staff not only refused to help but turned away paramedics, whom her friend had notified by calling 911. Angele could do no more than helplessly sit on the floor rocking and singing to her baby for 11 minutes until he died.
In 2006, Sycloria Williams delivered her 23-week-old baby on a recliner at A Gyn Diagnostic Center in Hialeah, Florida. When she began breathing and moving, abortion clinic owner Belkis Gonzalez cut the umbilical cord and zipped her into a biohazard bag, still alive.
In 2013, Jill Stanek testified before the House Judiciary Committee about her experience as a registered nurse in the labor and delivery department at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where she discovered babies being aborted alive and shelved to die in the department’s soiled utility closet. She said, “I was traumatized and changed forever by my experience of holding a little abortion survivor for 45 minutes until he died, a 21/22-week-old baby who had been aborted because he had Down syndrome.”
Originally published on April 12, 2021 and has been updated on January 27, 2023.
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Extrapolated Canadian Data What is covered in this article: The Definition A “born alive abortion” is defined as a failed abortion procedure
