Servants of Moloch
This is from the testimony of Jill Stanek, before the the Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee, who were debating a bill to protect the life of babies born alive after a failed attempt at abortion.
One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down’s syndrome baby who was born alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about ½ pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end, he was so quiet that I couldn’t tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall. After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where all of our dead patients are taken.
When she made public the fact that in Christ Hospital left babies who survived abortion — viable babies whose delivery was induced, and whom the abortionist intended to kill but somehow survived — we left alone in a utility room to die, it was discovered that no current law prevented the practice. New legislation was introduced to close the loopholes which allowed this infanticide. The Judiciary Committee was the then state Senator Barak Omaba, who argued and voted against the bill, saying that if the child "was not meant to live" it should not be kept alive.
Jill Stanek says further (http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000007034.cfm)
" The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Patrick O’Malley of Oak Lawn defined “born alive” using language identical to that of federal legislation introduced in 2000 by Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., who in turn drafted wording developed by the World Health Organization in 1950 and adopted by the United Nations in 1955."
I live in a country where Senator Trent Lott lost his position as majority leader in 2002 after making utterly innocent remarks at a party celebrating former Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday. (His remark was that the country "would have been better off" had Thurmond won his bid for the Presidency in 1948. Since Thurmond, a Democrat at the time, was running on a platform that included, as many Democrats at the time supported, segregation, Trent Lott’s comment was interpreted to be pro-Racist rather than pro-Democrat, or even pro-Centigenerian )
Those words cost the Republican his political career. Apparently Obama can say anything, no matter how purely evil, and the news will not report it, and the voters will not hold him to account.
In this audio clip from Obama’s 2002 Illinois Senate floor debate, he argued against the proposed law, which required that baby born alive after an attempted abortion could not be killed unless a second doctor, not the selfsame abortionist, examined the child and confirmed that it could not be saved.
Obama states that doing so would be a "burden" to the aborting mother’s "original decision." Listen for yourself:
Obama’s born alive but let die speech on mp3
(If the above mp3 is inoperative, a mirror is found at www.jillstanek.com/archives/2008/08/baipaobamamp3.html.)
Not even the most extreme pro-Choice groups go this far. They do not say that the baby should be killed or allowed to die once it is out of the womb.
Here is a quote from an article by Andrew C. McCarthy on this topic. I quote it here because it contains the pertinent details, which I am too sick at heart to repeat.
There’s a transcript of a state senate debate, which took place on April 4, 2002. That transcript is available here (the pertinent section runs from pages 31 to 34). I quote it extensively below (italics mine). After being recognized, Obama challenged the Born-Alive bill’s sponsor as follows:
OBAMA: Yeah. Just along the same lines. Obviously, this is an issue that we’ve debated extensively both in committee an on the floor so I — you know, I don’t want to belabor it. But I did want to point out, as I understood it, during the course of the discussion in committee, one of the things that we were concerned about, or at least I expressed some concern about, was what impact this would have with respect to the relationship between the doctor and the patient and what liabilities the doctor might have in this situation. So, can you just describe for me, under this legislation, what’s going to be required for a doctor to meet the requirements you’ve set forth?
SENATOR O’MALLEY: First of all, there is established, under this legislation, that a child born under such circumstances would receive all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, and that’s as defined, of course, by the … practice of medicine in the community where this would occur. It also requires, in two instances, that … an attending physician be brought in to assist and advise with respect to the issue of viability and, in particular, where … there’s a suspicion on behalf of the physician that the child … may be [viable,] … the attending physician would make that determination as to whether that would be the case…. The other one is where the child is actually born alive … in which case, then, the physician would call as soon as practically possible for a second physician to come in and determine the viability.
SENATOR OBAMA: So — and again, I’m — I’m not going to prolong this, but I just want to be clear because I think this was the source of the objections of the Medical Society. As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved. Is that correct?
SENATOR O’MALLEY: In the first instance, obviously the physician that is performing the procedure would make the determination. The second situation is where the child actually is born and is alive, and then there’s an assessment — an independent assessment of viability by … another physician at the soonest practical … time.
SENATOR OBAMA: Let me just go to the bill, very quickly. Essentially, I think as — as this emerged during debate and during committee, the only plausible rationale, to my mind, for this legislation would be if you had a suspicion that a doctor, the attending physician, who has made an assessment that this is a nonviable fetus and that, let’s say for the purpose of the mother’s health, is being — that — that — labor is being induced, that that physician (a) is going to make the wrong assessment and (b) if the physician discovered, after the labor had been induced, that, in fact, he made an error, or she made an error, and, in fact, that this was not a nonviable fetus but, in fact, a live child, that that physician, of his own accord or her own accord, would not try to exercise the sort of medical measures and practices that would be involved in saving that child. Now, it — if you think there are possibilities that doctors would not do that, then maybe this bill makes sense, but I — I suspect and my impression is, is that the Medical Society suspects as well that doctors feel that they would be under that obligation, that they would already be making these determinations and that, essentially, adding a — an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion. Now, if that’s the case — and — and I know that some of us feel very strongly one way or another on that issue — that’s fine, but I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if these are children who are being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they’re looked after.
This is staggering. As Obama spoke these words, he well knew that children were being born alive but precisely not looked after by the abortion doctors whose water the senator was carrying. As Stanek put it, as many as one in five — twenty percent — were left to die. That was what prompted the legislation in the first place.
Twenty percent left to die. Future generations will stare back at us with the same horror was stare back at the Aztecs, and their grisly human sacrifices, or at the Carthegenians, who passed their children into the fire for Moloch.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
