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Evil in Our Midst
So today, the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony about the “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” a piece of legislation Speaker Pelosi refuses to allow the House to vote on. Killing a child born in the course of an abortion is illegal; however, neglecting such a child until it dies remains legal. The testimony coming out of this committee is so sickening it had me seeing red:
But OBGYN Kathi Aultman, a former medical director at a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, testified that nurse Julie Wilkinson — who assisted an abortionist with late-term abortions — told her “that the vast majority of abortions that they performed were done for convenience, not for fetal anomalies or maternal health problems.” …
“I was a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Illinois, when I learned it committed abortions into the second and third trimesters. The procedure, called induced labor abortion, sometimes resulted in babies being aborted alive,” she said. “In the event a baby was aborted alive, he or she received no medical assessments or care but was only given what my hospital called ‘comfort care’ – made comfortable, as Governor Northam indicated.”
“One night, a nursing co-worker was transporting a baby who had been aborted because he had Down syndrome to our soiled utility room to die – because that’s where survivors were taken. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone, so I rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about 1/2 pound, and was about the size of my hand,” Stanek testified. “He was too weak to move very much, expending all his energy attempting to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet 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, I folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where we took all our dead patients,” she added. “Christ Hospital readily admitted babies there survived abortions. A spokesman told the Chicago Sun-Times (article submitted with testimony) ‘between 10 percent and 20 percent’ of aborted babies ‘survive for short periods.'”
Stanek testified that aborted babies would often live for an hour or two after their birth. One survived for as long as eight hours. They perished because they did not receive the care that could have saved their lives.
The nurse also recalled Christ Hospital’s “comfort room,” unveiled in December 2000. Rather than taking live aborted babies (an oxymoron term to avoid the truth of infanticide) to the soiled utility room to die, the nurses would take the babies to the comfort room.
“This was a small, nicely decorated room complete with a First Foto machine in case parents wanted pictures of their aborted babies, baptismal supplies if parents wanted their aborted babies baptized, and a foot printer and baby bracelets if parents wanted keepsakes of their aborted babies. There was also a wooden rocker to rock these babies to death,” Stanek testified. She submitted photos of the comfort room with her testimony.
The enormity of the evil here is physically sickening.
Let’s start with the horror of “Christ Hospital” (an appalling blasphemy if ever there was one) even performing abortions. By performing abortions, they seem to have greatly misunderstood “suffer the little ones to come unto me.” I can only hope that the “comfort room” was also for families with spontaneous abortions and miscarriages that resulted in infants for whom invasive neonatal care was not an option — otherwise, I cannot fathom the level of narcissistic heresy that would prompt someone to not feel guilty about either their fornication or their hiring of a murderer to kill their child, but then when the murderer botched the job, insist on a baptism where they claim to renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways on behalf of their murder victim! Photos and footprints and keepsakes? Keeping trophies of one’s kills is normally considered psychopathic, but apparently “Christ Hospital” is in the business of catering to the morally diseased.
Yes, I know good pro-lifers aren’t supposed to think that women who contract to kill their children are morally diseased because … well, I still haven’t figured it out exactly. It appears to be a combination of “they’re just silly little things who can’t be expected to take responsibility for their sex drives” and “they don’t realize that fetuses are people.” You know, just like how plantation owners didn’t think that slaves were people or the Nazis didn’t think Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals were people, and so we excuse their murders. And as noted, these are not women who are facing medical complications from the pregnancy or even the bearing children with the kind of severe genetic abnormalities that are brought up in these discussions as excuses to cull the untermensch — these are abortions of healthy babies ordered by healthy women.
Also on the topic of morally diseased, what about the doctors and nurses? How can anyone perform one of these operations, hold the living, breathing baby in one’s hands, and just leave it in a room to die of neglect? Sure, congratulations to Nurse Stanek for discovering morality, but I can’t fathom how she could live with being a paid accessory to murder for years.
And finally, on a tangent, I really wish the Catholic Church would start ordaining men instead of wittering old ladies in drag. At least, that’s my assumption as for why a woman who works to ensure murdering children by neglect will continue to be legal in this country has not been anathematized.
Published in Healthcare
They have been propagandized from an early age. It doesn’t work on all people. The enormity of what they have done might never hit them, but if and when it does, it hits very hard indeed. I pray for them. They are victims of another sort.
They’re no more victims than Hitler Youth who became SS. If women are indeed legally and morally equal to men, then we need to treat them that way. Conspiracy to commit murder doesn’t become okay because one is a woman and the victim is one’s child.
But they’ve been raised in a culture that tells them it isn’t murder. A culture that acts to marginalize all of those who would tell them differently. That is enough to sway some. Evil is involved, though. Evil is always involved.
Still, the pro-life message gets out. It will continue to do so. Truth is like that.
Nazis were raised in a culture that told them that killing Jews wasn’t murder. Does anyone think we should have set up Project Rachel like charities for the Nazis? I have been told all my life that abortion in this country is a crime comparable to the Holocaust, but yet somehow it’s a Holocaust for which no one is supposed to be punished. Some allow that maybe the doctors should be, because they ought to know better. (In much the same way that it’s only newsworthy in this country when whites shoot minorities, because apparently minorities can’t be expected to understand that murder is wrong but whites should know better.)
If abortion really is murder, then the people who hire the killers are not victims but perpetrators.
Amy,
After the Gov. of Virginia made his little explanation of what would be done, I began to think along a line that I had never thought before. If I’m plain wrong, tell me so.
Like I said before, if I’m plain wrong then tell me so. The Gov. of Virginia was so calm and casual in the way he said it that I got the feeling that this was happening a lot. A lot more than it should be if it was “an accident”.
For a third time tell me if there is a hole in my logic.
Regards,
Jim
As noted:
My only reason to think your scenario isn’t very common is that why would that 10-20% not be immediately lethally injected instead of being left to die of neglect? Because yeah, I don’t see how one could easily tell the difference.
Evil.
And the idea that anyone would want keepsakes of a deliberately aborted pregnancy is nuts. I wonder how many people actually use that service?
Like I said, I can only hope it was intended for and mostly used by folks like my cousin Wanda who lost her baby at five months. She was having complications, so they induced labor knowing that he was unlikely to survive for long but would have been in even more danger in utero. For her, the photo and foot print are precious tokens of her baby that lived for four hours.
Amy,
If I understand what you said, you are telling me that I could easily be right and that murdering the newborn child may very well be going on regularly. Remember the requirement of delivering the child and the child breathing on its own is the last argument that stands in the way of declaring this a living human being as opposed to a fetus.
What you are telling me is that murder may well be taking place on a large scale by anyone’s definition right now. If this could be documented then I think a huge scandal would take place. I don’t think this country is so far gone as to stand still while a living baby is murdered on the delivery table. If the lunatics defend this it will be the last time they see elective office for a very long time.
Regards,
Jim
At least one lunatic is still welcome to receive Communion for letting it happen! Because again, there doesn’t seem to be a member of the Catholic priesthood with the testicular fortitude to make an unpopular stand.
How dare that hospital call itself “Christ”? The real one is weeping for this.
Amy,
For this, maybe the old Pope wants to come back out of retirement. At the risk of insulting my Catholic friends, the new Pope is an idiot.
Regards,
Jim
There is one acceptable answer to this: Abolish human abortion. Now. Forever.
Friends of mine who work regularly outside our local killing mill regularly note (in word and video) how many women go in to the place of killing proud as can be that they are killing their children and many brag about how many they’ve killed so far. A recent visitor had killed 12 prior to the last. They (the murderers) would laugh in your face if you called them victims because they know full well what they are doing as they admit it and celebrate it. In some cases they leave the ones they didn’t kill to hang out in the parking lot with a relative while they go kill their sibling just on the other side of the wall.
Hitler was a chump in comparison to this.
Yeah, James, I’m sorrowed immensely but what you are describing is what should happen and not what does happen.
Evil indeed. I get sick to my stomach reading stories like these.
I agree with your tangent. You write as one who thinks the US bishops still have some moral authority – and that can be a real stretch for many when one looks at the past year and the McCarrick scandal.
But. There have been a few who have come out to say that pro-abort politicians cannot receive communion in his diocese: Raymond Burke (when he was archbishop of St. Louis), Thomas Paprocki of Springfield IL, Thomas Daly of Spokane WA, Joseph Naumann of KC, and Joseph Strickland of Tyler TX (my bishop).
Second but. That is a shamefully short list. You are right to call out the Catholic bishops. The poster girl for lack of testicular fortitude is Cardinal Cupich of Chicago – he of the “we’re not going down rabbit holes because we have more important things like climate change and immigration to worry about”. He is famous for telling his flock not to
protestpray outside abortion clinics when he was shepherd of Spokane.With the fall of McCarrick and Wuerl there was a sliver of hope that a sound bishop would be placed in DC – where denying Holy Communion to the pro-abort community could have made a real difference – but Pope Francis continued the same old same old with his appointment of Gregory.
It is a disgrace that the bishops are so weak and timid. They should be sending exorcists out to these clinics to perform exorcisms on these facilities and should be publicly shaming politicians who continue to turn their backs on this issue with their “I’m personally opposed, but who am I to impose my views on this on others”. I think for most it is a double lie – they are not opposed to abortion and they love imposing their views on us on hundreds of other issues.
Despicable.
When I read that account yesterday, I kept wondering why she — or anyone who testified to these events — didn’t immediately attempt to keep that baby alive? “I was just following orders”? If it was a matter of legality, wouldn’t that be the perfect time for some defiance of the law? Heck, rush out the back door, then run in the front door of the hospital, and say you just found the child outside in a basket or something. Do anything!
The fact that they had a “comfort room” specifically set aside for letting the baby die, including baptismal supplies and a photo booth? Doesn’t that tell you immediately that they know these aren’t just waste products but living, human children carrying the imago dei?
“It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.” — Flannery O’Connor
Deeply sick and disturbing – and to think Pelosi is a practicing Catholic! There are no words – this had to be very hard to write, but thank you for exposing it to the light.
Great, if nauseating, post. And great comments everyone.
Maybe someone should read the Ten Commandments to administrators of “Christ Hospital.” Because if what they’re doing isn’t taking the Lord’s name in vain, I don’t know what is.
The “First Foto” thing got to me . . .
First, I’m not sure that Nazis were reared in the belief that killing Jews was okay, only (!!) that Jews were a dangerous evil to be combatted by any means necessary. Even Hitler did not originally plan on Auschwitz; the Holocaust evolved into its full murderous lunacy over time. A quibble of sorts, but germane to the conversation. One of the lessons of pre-War German social history is how, over time, ordinary, good-hearted people can be groomed to be perpetrators or indifferent bystanders to evil. By benefiting directly from the oppression and deportation of their Jewish neighbors—for example, by gaining access to their possessions—individual Germans were made just complicit enough to want to believe that what was happening wasn’t actually evil at all.
Well, we’ve all been “groomed” over time to be perpetrators, “beneficiaries” and bystanders to abortion. If, as is often claimed, a quarter of American women will have had an abortion by the age of forty, no one reading these words lacks a friend, family member, co-worker or customer who has participated in murder, and these include all the men who were (obviously but strangely invisibly) part of the equation too.
Everyone under the age of sixty has indeed been reared to consider abortion a morally neutral solution when sex—also presented as essentially morally neutral as long as consent has been obtained—results in what sex is designed to result in.
The people who shout “blob of cells” genuinely believe what they are saying and by now they need to believe it. It is disorienting and painful to stop believing it.
Moreover, IMHOm, to accept that abortion is, or even can be, wrong is psychologically destabilizing because we have a deeply-held, if often unspoken, belief that women are, not to put too fine a point on it, morally superior to men. Non-violent, compassionate, naturally loving, wise…
Hence the determined insistence that later abortions (at least) are only done when the fetus is tragically and, it is implied, painfully deformed. Late abortion is really mercy-killing and that’s why wise maternal love all-but demands it.
Or, abortion is the way a good mother ensures that she can take adequate care of her already-born children; her sacrifice is for them.
But above all, rape must loom much larger in the discussion of abortion than it does in the practice of it—mention of rape (particularly combined with youth, as implied in the inevitable “and incest”) invokes a strangely non-specific female powerlessness. Whether the abortion in question follows upon a rape or not, rape nonetheless provides the general context for it. It is the shorthand for a more all-encompassing, and all-excusing female helplessness.
You can’t have power without responsibility, however, something feminism has yet to grasp or reconcile. I keep returning to the spectacle of Dr. Blasey-Ford, weeping on the witness stand with the full (and generally fulfilled) expectation that every heart would obediently wring itself in sympathy for her suffering. Which is to say that America was expected to believe that what happened to her thirty years before —a two-minute “sexual assault”—caused appalling psychological damage still painfully evident in middle age.
To me, the obvious conclusion to be drawn from Blasy-Ford’s distress, and the shrieking, caterwauling, dare-I-say hysterical identification with it was not that Brett Kavanaugh should not be confirmed to the Supreme Court. [There is no evidence he did anything to the pathetic Miss Blasey of course, but let’s take the feminists at their word for now].
Instead, it is that teenaged girls are not, in fact, capable of negotiating the hazards of co-ed social “spaces.” Claims of “rape culture” on college campuses and widespread, traumatizing #MeToo reports of sexual harassment in the workplace plus the oft-cited statistic that, upon discovering that she is pregnant one in four women will be subjected to miserable, humiliating, painful and expensive (even if morally neutral) “reproductive healthcare,” the details of which must be hidden from her to spare her delicate sensibilities…
In brief, what Camille Paglia calls “fainting couch feminism” insists that the feminists of my own vintage were wrong. Women are not strong, we are not invincible and we can’t, in fact, do “anything.” At least, not without protection for our vulnerable bodies and fragile psyches. The Victorians (and Muslims) were and are right: Girls must not be in the presence of unrelated males (or, for that matter, related ones: “incest!” remember) males without a chaperone, women cannot negotiate their own sexual lives, and schools and workplaces must be sternly monitored and/or segregated.
I wonder whether the behavior of the Bishops (Priests, Pope) can be meaningfully compared with the Church in the Nazi Era; the unwillingness to risk speaking out especially when some sort of cost-benefit analysis made anti-Communism or, in our day, Climate Change, the larger evil?
I’ve seen at close remove the effects of that belief failing. It is not pretty, but there is a source of forgiveness even for that.
Incidentally, I can definitely see why parents who have been persuaded that abortion is the humane, medically-appropriate (or even only) “treatment” for profound fetal anomaly would want pictures and footprints.
Until I came to Ricochet, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as Prenatal Hospice. If I’d been pregnant with a child that had some truly dreadful condition, I might easily have been persuaded to have an abortion. I’d have believed, as many do, that it was the most loving thing to do for the child. In that case, I would indeed have wanted a little footprint, or a photograph because I would in fact love my baby and long for her/him afterward.
It is not difficult for white-clad doctors to persuade patients (or, for that matter, themselves) that they know exactly the right thing to do. We trust them because we have to.
I’d like to address Amy’s cri de coeur about the injustice of women procuring abortions being exempt from murder charges. I understand her passion on the subject, but, clearly, a society capable of toleration of such evils is not ready to acknowledge the extent of culpability of the perpetrators.
If the objective is to save babies, I’m afraid we’re going to have to fight incrementally. However, I acknowledge the philosophical premise that no good can be achieved by evil means.
Hi Serif! Hugs all ’round at your house!
No we don’t. There are many examples of women who forgo life-saving cancer treatment so that their child might live — against doctor’s recommendations. The questions regarding, “what to do, what to do?” are always questions of moral agency and which authority (Authority) to trust. Don’t kill innocent humans is a pretty straight-forward injunction.
There are people capable of transcending “expert” advice. We call them saints.
Or they’re trying to cover their rears:
From a link in the linked PJ Media piece.
We had a friend go through this some years ago – she gave birth even though she knew her daughter would not live more than a few hours due to malformed lungs. Those few hours meant the world to her and to the other children, who got to hold and love their baby sister for a time.