A nurse from the United Kingdom is pleading with legislators to not allow the abortion pill to continue to be dispensed through the mail, recalling how she was traumatized when she saw a baby survive an abortion.
In an op-ed for the Daily Mail, Nadine Dorries explained that her time working on the gynecological ward as a nurse was happy and rewarding, until she was ordered to help with an abortion at 27 weeks.
The baby was born alive:
The expectant mother, who was only 16, had been injected in her uterine cavity with the hormone prostaglandin. Several excruciating hours later, the foetus — a little boy — was delivered.
He was dropped in a bedpan, and the ward sister handed him to me, saying: ‘Take this into the sluice room and leave it there until I come. Stay with it.’
As I closed the sluice-room door, I removed the paper covering from the bedpan. I have never forgotten what I saw. There lay a tiny baby boy, blinking, covered in mucus, blood and amniotic fluid, gasping for breath, his little arms and legs twitching.
I was shocked to my core. Weeping, I rocked the bedpan in my arms. I wanted to pick him up but he was so small, I didn’t know how to. After a minute or so, I couldn’t bear it any longer, and I was about to run for help when I heard the ward sister’s unmistakable footsteps approaching.
As she took the bedpan from me, he stopped breathing. I checked my fob watch: a little boy had been born, lived and died in the space of seven minutes. Mine was the only face he saw, my sobs the only sounds he heard.
Distressed, I turned to the ward sister and said: ‘He was breathing.’ Through her dark-rimmed glasses she glared at me, saying: ‘No he wasn’t. You didn’t see that.’
Though Dorries still expresses support for “safe and legal” abortion, the event scarred her for life. But the move to allow women to receive abortion pills in the mail, no matter how far along they are, is a step too far for her.
“[W]hile nobody relishes seeing desperate and vulnerable women being prosecuted for undergoing procedures they felt they had no choice about, the rights of the unborn have to be balanced against those of the living,” Dorries said. “The original rules were brought in for good reason: and they protect would-be mothers as much as babies. In sending the message to women that abortion is fine until birth, Creasy and Johnson’s amendments risk placing vulnerable women in life-threatening situations: encouraging them to end late-term pregnancies at home in the absence of proper care. And even if a late-term foetus is ‘safely’ aborted, the psychological scarring can be acute — as I know from my experience all those years ago.”
Infants surviving abortions are often derided as a myth, but it happens all too often — and, as Dorries pointed out, giving women access to abortion pills at home, without medical supervision and at any point throughout pregnancy, could very well mean women would see their babies born alive after attempted abortions.
Photo of aborted baby left to die, from the Grantham Collection (not the baby mentioned in this article)
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that over the course of 12 years, more than a hundred infants were reported to have survived for at least a short time after abortions, though there were likely more that went unreported. A recent abortion report from Minnesota revealed that five children were born alive during abortions in that state in 2021 alone, and further added that none of them received medical care — in other words, they were left to die. (Shockingly, Minnesota recently voted to no longer report the number of abortion survivors.) Still another report found that over 100 babies were born alive following abortions in just five states over approximately a decade.
And women who have undergone chemical abortions themselves have said that seeing their preborn children struggle to survive is deeply traumatizing.
“I delivered this baby,” one woman said. “It was like, the baby was like this big, laying fetal position, and I saw the little tiny limbs, little arm, like… little everything. There was a tiny umbilical cord. Tiny. It was like this big [motions to size of her thumb], so small, and the baby’s heart was still beating. Oh, that killed me. That was a lot. I screamed.”
