World Magazine - Weekly News: Labor and Delivery Abortions

"Labor and delivery abortions" are another type of very late-term abortion. They involve a baby about to be born, or maybe two weeks out. This article describes two variants of the procedure, as follows:

Last week, Ms. [Jill] Stanek[, RN, formerly an L&D nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, IL] told WORLD that hospitals and abortion clinics approach L&D abortion differently. "Hospitals don't kill the baby before they initiate the procedure. They have more of a mentality of a covert type of killing, of inducing prematurely and letting them die 'naturally,'" sometimes by allowing them to suffocate in the birth canal. Abortion clinics, however, try to kill the baby before inducing labor, often by injecting the baby's heart with digoxin.

Nurse Stanek also gave evidence in support of the Born-alive Infant Protection Act of 2000. Now, it would appear, some (and I emphasize some) hospitals, and a lot of abortion mills, are flouting this law. Nor is this new: in 1973, Kenneth Edelin, MD, was arrested and stood trial for manslaughter for initiating a premature delivery and then suffocating the baby in the birth canal while he watched the clock. A jury convicted him, but then the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed the conviction 5-1 in 1976. This is the same court, by the way, that has now Constitutionalized same-sex "marriage" in Massachusetts. The SJC held, in essence, that no one but Dr. Edelin was in any position to judge whether the unborn child, who was 24 weeks along, could have lived--but in fact such extremely premature infants have lived since then, and were being kept alive when I was in medical school in 1980-5.

And now hospitals are doing their own modified Edelin dilation and suffocation procedure on babies that they know are viable. Robert Mendelsohn was right: Hospitals are often dangerous places for the sick--and the well.