Infant Born Alive Act (2000)
Nurses testified before the Judiciary Committee about how medical personnel deal with the results of “induced labor abortion” at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. Under this technique, a drug forces the woman’s cervix open and the woman expels a premature baby who dies during the process or soon afterward. Most are disabled and too small to survive.
Jill Stanek, one of the Christ Hospital nurses, said she retrieved a 10-inch, 21-week-old Down’s syndrome baby from a soiled utility room and cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. One nurse, Stanek said, told her of an aborted baby who was supposed to have spina bifada but was delivered with an intact spine. Another 23-week-old baby, she said, “who showed 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.”
Last year, Alberta Report magazine said that Foothills Hospital in Calgary, Alberta, was conducting two or three induction abortions a week, many of which result in live births. Afraid of losing their jobs but repelled by hospital policy, four nurses spoke out anonymously. All protested the killing of the unborn because they may be defective. One said that doctors are frequently wrong about diagnosing a serious mental or physical defect, but even when a baby is born apparently healthy, the doctors often choose to hide their mistakes and let the baby die.
Here’s why the bill is more than a gambit in the abortion wars. We live at a time when the intellectual groundwork for the promotion of infanticide is already in place and spreading. Peter Singer at Princeton and other influential scholars around the country argue that birth is an arbitrary point for society to bestow personhood (and therefore constitutional protections). They want it later, so parents would have some time to decide whether to dispatch the baby or keep it. Jeffrey Reiman, philosophy professor at American University, thinks that infants do not “possess in their own right a property that makes it wron