From the Department of Nauseated Head Shaking: Baby Boy Lives 2 Days After Botched Abortion
The U.K. Telegraph reported today that a 22-week old Italian baby boy died after being abandoned after a failed abortion. This wasn’t any back-alley abortion–the child was left by hospital doctors to die alone, but lived for almost two days. From the Telegraph:
He was discovered alive the following day, some 20 hours after the operation, by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.
He found that the baby, wrapped in a sheet with his umbilical cord still attached, was moving and breathing.
The priest raised the alarm and doctors immediately arranged for the infant to be taken to a specialist neonatal unit at a neighbouring hospital where he died on Monday morning.
Italian police are investigating the case for “homicide” because infanticide is illegal in Italy.
The law means that doctors have had an obligation to try to preserve the life of the child once he had survived the abortion.
The Italian government is also considering an inquiry into the conduct of the hospital staff.
The Telegraph reports that this is not the first instance of a child born alive during an abortion in Italy, that a similar event happened three years ago. But I’d bet that these are just two incidents of many that go unreported.
The other involved a baby in Florence who weighed just 17oz when he was aborted at 22 weeks because of a suspected genetic disorder but lived for three days.
In both cases, the children were aborted because prenatal tests had revealed the possibility of birth defects. As if ending the life of a helpless child in the womb wasn’t enough, the fact some doctors might leave children to die is truly terrifying. The pro-abortion side rails that Born Alive Infant protection laws serve no purpose but to threaten Roe v. Wade, but then there are stories like this one.
President Obama, as an Illinois State Senator, voted against any legal protections for infants who happened to survive an abortion.
