Midwife on babies born alive after abortions: They are viewed as “waste”

In June of last year, the European Centre for Law and Justice released a report entitled “Late Term Abortion & Neonatal Infanticide in Europe: Petition for the Rights of Newborns Surviving Their Abortion,” which documented cases of babies born alive after abortions in Europe. These children were not allowed to survive. Some were killed by direct action, others were left alone to die of neglect.

Most of these abortions were done by induction. In the United States, this type of abortion is generally used in the third trimester.  A drug, usually digoxin (a heart medication, used off-label), is injected into the preborn baby in order to kill him or her, and then the woman goes through labor to deliver her dead child.

The video below shows former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino explaining this procedure step-by-step:

3rd Trimester Induction Abortion: Injection and Stillbirth

In the European report, a midwife identified as Mrs. M.B., gives the following eyewitness testimony in which she explains how aborted babies delivered without lethal injection were often born alive:

A midwife for almost 9 years, I can testify that babies born from late abortions (case of abortion on medical grounds) without feticide, usually between 20 and 24 weeks gestation, may be born alive. The medical team is then often uncomfortable and either puts the baby in a tray in a separate room until he stops showing signs of life, or asks a gynecologist, anesthetist or pediatrician for a morphine injection in the cord that some accept … or not. For my part, I have already proposed to concerned couples that if the baby was alive at birth, to lay him on the woman’s stomach for him to die with dignity. Two couples agreed.

These were babies aborted because they had a disability or fetal anomaly such as Down syndrome.

Could any of these babies have lived? The survival rates for healthy premature babies born between 22 and 24 weeks are as follows:

22 weeks: 5%

23 weeks: 26%

24 weeks:  56%

Some of the children may have had conditions that would have prevented their survival, but others would have had a chance to live if given medical care. The midwife gave no details as to the disabilities the babies were diagnosed with, but in the United States, women often abort babies with spina bifida, blindness, Down syndrome, dwarfism, and other non-lethal disabilities.

The midwife decided she no longer wanted to assist with abortions:

I recently decided not to participate in abortions on demand or abortions on medical grounds and to apply my conscience clause, which I can do because I am incumbent. I will probably leave the relevant services, including the delivery room. Those contractual employees who would apply their conscience clause are threatened with not having their contracts renewed.

Some hospital employees, then, were pressured to assist in acts of infanticide under penalty of losing their jobs. The midwife concludes:

In my experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to protect the right to abortion, an embryo or fetus is considered to be a person by medical practitioners under two conditions:

1. The child must be wanted by the parents and

2. The child must be “normal” and not “disabled” (with all the risks that such a subjective term permits).

As soon as the fetus fails to meet these conditions, it is just considered to be waste… It’s terrible to say, but that is the truth.

Aborting children because they might not be perfect is ableism at its worst. The value of life should not be determined by whether the baby is “normal” and whether the parents want him. These children who die, often alone and in pain, gasping for air due to underdeveloped lungs or injected with drugs, are casualties of a selfish, ableist society.