Human Rights

Horrific, little-known abortion method: Cut the umbilical cord and wait for cardiac arrest

Planned Parenthood, abortion reporting, abortion

Exsanguination is a little-known form of abortion no one seems to talk about – until recently. By definition, exsanguination is the action of draining a person, animal, or organ of blood. Apparently, based on the testimony of an abortionist who has aborted preborn children for 50 years, it’s also a way to kill children before they are born by cutting the umbilical cord… and waiting.

Abortionist Dr. Forrest Smith says he has committed over 50,000 abortions, and recently testified in support of pro-life undercover Center for Medical Progress investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt during their criminal preliminary hearing. Smith stated that babies are “no question” being born alive so their organs can be harvested. During his testimony, Smith admitted that abortion is killing, saying, “You can kill a human being, which I admit abortion is, but you have to do it in certain ways.”

One of the ways Planned Parenthood abortionists are allegedly aborting children in order to secure intact bodies and organs to sell to researchers is the illegal partial-birth abortion (D&X) method. Smith, however, seems uninterested in committing the illegal abortion procedure and found a way to get around the law: exsanguination.

According to LifeSiteNews, Smith testified that he extracts and cuts the umbilical cord and then “watches with my ultrasound” for the preborn child’s heart to stop beating. He said that this usually takes “six-and-a-half to seven minutes.” It’s an abortion procedure he has been using for 25 years. And he’s not the only one.

Former Planned Parenthood Metro Health Center abortionist Leah Torres made headlines in 2018 with a now-deleted tweet stating that “fetuses can’t scream” because she “transect[s] the cord 1st so there’s really no opportunity.” Torres had also worked for Rocky Mountain Women’s Health Center at the time.

While the infamous tweet wasn’t specific about which cord she cut – the spinal, the umbilical, or the vocal – Torres later cleared that up a followup tweet. “Oh! Yeah, no… the ‘cord’ is the umbilical cord. That’s basic anatomy, come on,” she wrote. Torres lost her job because her employer said she violated a provision of her contract requiring her to uphold a “professional reputation.” She sued three media outlets for defamation, saying she was forced to relocate out of Utah to find a job.

Cutting the umbilical cord when the preborn child is still in the womb sends the child into cardiac arrest, according to a 2013 study on this abortion method. The study was by the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and was headed by former faculty member Kristina Tocce. Tocce is the medical director for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. Metro Health Center — where Torres worked — is an abortion facility under Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

The study found that transecting the cord and documenting fetal cardiac arrest before using dilation and evacuation (D&E) to tear off the preborn child’s arms and legs, is an effective means of killing the baby. The study included 407 preborn children from 16 to 23 weeks gestation. Babies born as early as 21 weeks have survived, meaning this study was done on viable children. These 407 ‘cases’ “were reviewed to determine success, time to fetal asystole [cardiac arrest] and complications.”

One hundred percent of the babies in the study were successfully killed and died within 11 minutes of the cord being cut. The babies older than 20 weeks took longer to die on average (around nine minutes) than the babies younger than 20 weeks (around four minutes). 4.6 percent of women had minor complications and .3 percent had major complications during or after the abortion.

The study concluded that “Umbilical cord transection immediately prior to D&E is a feasible, efficacious and safe way to induce fetal demise without performing additional procedures.”

It is impossible to “safely” destroy an innocent human being.

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