Testimony of Jill L. Stanek, RN, before the United States Congress Hearing on
H.R. 4292, the "Born Alive Infant Protection Act of 2000" July 20, 2000
I am a Registered Nurse who has worked in the Labor and Delivery Department at
Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, for the past five years. Christ Hospital
performs abortions on women in their second or even third trimesters of
pregnancy. Sometimes the babies being aborted are healthy, and sometimes they
are not.
The method of abortion that Christ Hospital uses is called "induced labor
abortion," also now known as "live birth abortion." This type of abortion can be
performed different ways, but the goal always is to cause a pregnant woman's
cervix to open so that she will deliver a premature baby who dies during the
birth process or soon afterward. The way that induced abortion is most often
executed at my hospital is by the physician inserting a medication called
Cytotec into the birth canal close to the cervix. Cytotec irritates the cervix
and stimulates it to open. When this occurs, the small, pre-term baby drops out
of the uterus, oftentimes alive. It is not uncommon for one of these live
aborted babies to linger for an hour or two or even longer. One of them once
lived for almost eight hours.
In the event that a baby is aborted alive, he or she receives no medical
assessments or care but is only given what my hospital calls "comfort care."
"Comfort care" is defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until he or she
dies, although even this minimal compassion is not always provided. It is not
required that these babies be held during their short lives.
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 1/2 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.
Other co-workers have told me many upsetting stories about live aborted babies
whom they have cared for. I was told about an aborted baby who was supposed to
have Spina bifida but was delivered with an intact spine. Another nurse is
haunted by the memory of an aborted baby who came out weighing much more than
expected‹almost two pounds. She is haunted because she doesn't know if she made
a mistake by not getting that baby medical help. A Support Associate told me
about a live aborted baby who was left to die on the counter of the Soiled
Utility Room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown
into the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the
baby, the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor.
I was recently told about a situation by a nurse who said, "I can't stop
thinking about it." She had a patient who was 23+ weeks pregnant, and it did not
look as if her baby would be able to continue to live inside of her. The baby
was healthy and had up to a 39% chance of survival, according to national
statistics. But the patient chose to abort. The baby was born alive.
If the mother had wanted everything done for her baby, there would have been a
neonatologist, pediatric resident, neonatal nurse, and respiratory therapist
present for the delivery, and the baby would have been taken to our Neonatal
Intensive Care Unit for specialized care. Instead, the only personnel present
for this delivery were an obstetrical resident and my co-worker. After delivery
the baby, who showed early signs of thriving, was merely wrapped in a blanket
and kept in the Labor and Delivery Department until she died 2-1/2 hours later.
Something is very wrong with a legal system that says doctors are mandated to
pronounce babies dead but are not mandated to assess babies for life and chances
of survival. In other words, our laws currently say that babies have no rights
to medical oversight until they are dead. We look the other way and pretend that
these babies aren't human while they're alive but human only after they are
dead. We issue these babies both birth and death certificates, but it is really
only the death certificate that matters. No other children in America are
medically abandoned like this.
Abortion is a cancer that is literally killing America. It is killing our
children while it is killing our consciences. It began when we took God out of
our decision-making and proclaimed that the little beings growing inside of
women were "products of conception" and not little girls and little boys.
Who should be surprised that we keep pushing the envelope so that now we are
aborting these "products of conception" alive? I even work at a hospital named
"Christ" that does this very thing! It is beyond me to comprehend that we're
doing what we're doing now, and so I can't even imagine what horrible ways we
will think of next to torture our children. Please help put an end to this by
proclaiming infants as American human being Homo sapiens with the same legal and
medical rights that you and I big people have.