Neonatologist who cared for abortion survivor speaks against Colorado Amendment 79

An opinion piece by a retired neonatologist recently published in The Denver Post highlights some of the dangers of the extreme pro-abortion amendment the state’s voters will see on the ballot next week.

In the piece, Dr. Elizabeth H. Thilo warns that Amendment 79 would allow abortion all the way up to birth, even though infants born in the late second and third trimesters are capable of surviving outside the womb — a dichotomy she invites readers to consider.

“There is no question in my mind, or in the medical literature, that premature infants who are 23 weeks or 24 weeks gestation are individual human beings who feel pain, recognize the touch, voice, and smell of their mother, and have improved outcomes when their mother and father are able to be with them,” she writes.

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“I have had the experience while working at the University of Colorado Anschutz NICU of caring for a 32-week gestation infant who was born alive after an attempted abortion, who was admitted to our nursery and required only tube feedings and warmth for survival. He was immediately adopted by a family and went on to have an uncomplicated hospital stay. Who is to say he will not go on to make significant contributions to his family, to his community, or to the world at large?”

Thilo also dispels the myth that late abortions are committed primarily for a fetal diagnosis or health threat — a myth Live Action News has also debunked — noting, “Data from Arizona, a state that tracks women’s reasons for abortion, shows that most abortions performed in that state after 21 weeks of gestation are performed without a fetal diagnosis or a health threat to the mother.”

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She points out, “How can we allow abortion in late pregnancy for healthy babies? Shouldn’t abortion in late pregnancy, after 23 weeks, involving healthy babies be considered murder, since that is what it would be called if the life of a baby in the NICU, or a [two]-month-old baby was ‘terminated’?”

Thilo ends her piece decrying taxpayer-funded abortion, writing, “We do not need a constitutional amendment to protect the right to an abortion for any reason at any time in the pregnancy and to allow public tax dollars to pay for it. There is another human life involved in this process; these babies are not just ‘clumps of cells’ or a mass of tissue. They are every bit as human as any other person, although they are not yet able to speak for themselves.”

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