Lies make the baby Jesus cry

Blurring the line between abortion and infanticide doesn’t seem to upset him, however. Or some serious infant weeping might break out over this story on the Pomegranate Apple blog:

Gianna Gessen: A Story About a Birth
“To everyone’s great shock and surprise, I didn’t arrive dead but alive on April the sixth 1977 in a Los Angelos county abortion clinic”
“What’s fantastic about this, about the perfect timing of my arrival, is that the abortionist was not on duty yet. So he wasn’t even given the opportunity to continue on for his plan for my life which was death.”
“So a nurse called an ambulance and had me transferred to a hospital which is absolutely miraculous. Generally the practice at the time….and up until 2002 was to end the life of an abortion survivor by strangulation, suffocation, leaving the baby to die, or throwing the baby away.”

There’s even a video to support these “extraordinary claims.”

Hmm. How unconvinced am I that a full-term or close-to-full-term baby was minutes away from abortion? Quite unconvinced, to put it mildly.

(I could put this more forcefully, of course, but any sane readers will be able to judge the validity of this tale for themselves.)

How unconvinced am I that it was standard practice to murder babies that somehow sprang fully-viable from a botched abortion? Yet again, I have to report that this information seems so unrelated to “truth” that it may be from a different species.

(I am also pretty dumbstruck by her characterising an abortion doctor as someone with a “plan for my life which was death.” )

I find myself almost weeping on behalf of an absent baby Jesus at the sheer dishonest effrontery of this tale.

25 thoughts on “Lies make the baby Jesus cry

  1. Thanks for the link to pomegranate apple. I liked the video.

    Just did a little research on line and found this:

    A law is now in place protecting babies that are born alive during abortions, (a law that Planned Parenthood fought tooth and nail)but it was not always that way. Here is the under oath testimony of a registered nurse, talking about how babies that survived abortion were treated in her hospital.

    Hearing on H.R. 4292, the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act of 2000”

    Testimony of Jill L. Stanek, RN:

    “I am a Registered Nurse who has worked in the Labor & Delivery Department at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, for the past five years. “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, preterm 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 ½ 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.”

  2. and this:

    “For the most part, the abortion industry stopped using saline and prostaglandin procedures because of the number of live births. A live birth means you have to let the baby die, or dispose of it in some distasteful way. Most second and third trimester abortionists use the D&E method, (dilation and evacuation) The abortionist uses large forceps to crush the baby inside the mother’s uterus and removes it in pieces. The side effects of live births and the mother going through labor are avoided. But it is a horrible procedure in which the baby must be re-constructed outside the uterus to be certain all the parts have been removed.”

    Carol Everett, former owner of 2 abortion clinics and director of 4, on the abortion procedure. Quoted in an interview with her in the “Human Life Alliance Advertising Supplement” 1994. (Ms. Everett was busted for having her clinics knowingly perform abortions on nonpregnant women, at a great risk of causing damage to the cervix and future miscarriages)

  3. and this:

    From the workshop “Meet the Abortion Providers” held in Chicago, former abortion provider David Brewer, M.D., included the following:

    “But one night, a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was uncontrollable. I went in the room and she was going to pieces. She was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing. The nurses were upset because they couldn’t get any work done and all the other patients were upset because this lady was screaming and I walked in, and here was her little saline abortion baby. It had been born and it was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns. Because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs too.”

  4. Also from the Born Alive infant protection Act Hearing:

    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 resident5, 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 & 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…

  5. Lee,

    Thanks for your comments and I will let Heather respond to the brunt of the issues raised.

    I am interested by the implication that there are so many late-term abortions in the US. I was under the impression that Roe v Wade only allowed for abortions upto 24 weeks unless there were exceptional circumstances.

    Equally, I am interested by the idea that live birth abortions are carried out in a developed nation with access to legal abortions. Partial birth abortions (0.17% of all US abortions in 2000, banned in 2003) might be what this is talking about but inaccuracy diminishes the overall credibility.

    Do you have a better link than the on you gave here – does the congressional district keep an online transcript for example?

    Back on to the original topic of the article: Lying for Jesus is still lying. If people need to make things up, change facts (etc) to get their point across, then there is a problem.

  6. Hey lee, the 18th century rang and said it wanted its testimony back. Try to look at real, current, stuff rather than lies made up by anti-choicers. This is total crap and is just an example of what happens in back street abortions – what happens if you criminalise the clinics.

  7. Aren’t you talking about an old issue? The girl in the video was born in the 70’s…
    Maybe I misunderstood the point of your post. It seemed to me you were implying that the girl in the video is lying about the circumstances of her birth. I watched the video (thanks again for the link), it seemed interesting, she didn’t seem to be lying…I did some research. Not extensive…I’m just a blog reader, but it was pretty easy to find information that proved what the girl in the video claims.

    I suppose lots of other people would have proved her birth certificate (signed by the abortionist) and her medical records wrong by now if she was lying.

    Are you saying that these kinds of failed abortions didn’t happen, or don’t happen? (now there is a law against letting infants die if they survive an abortion…so hopefully they don’t happen anymore).

    The US congress took it seriously:
    Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2001

  8. Lee
    I haven’t commented before because the whole story strikes me as emotive propaganda, that I’ve already given more attention than it deserves. But, maybe I have to make some response.

    Even on the content of the story – she doesn’t claim to have survived an abortion. She claims to have been born before a planned abortion could take place.

    Which means that all the references to strangling and suffocating the newborn abortion survivor would be completely irrelevant even if they were true

    An abortion that was so late that a fully viable baby could be born before it happened seems pretty unlikely. I don’t know anything about US abortion law in the 1970s, but the USA would have been pretty well unique in the world if the abortion of full-term healthy babies was allowed in 1970s.

    But, let’s assume for one minute that you have evidence that abortion survivors have indeed been murdered. Surely, there were already laws against murder in the US without there having to be a “Born-alive protection act”. If there have been known and documented murders, one would normally expect there to be murder trials.

  9. Lee, me old chestnut. This is too good an opportunity to pass up, so I will respond to your comment with a new post. Your comments are always welcomed here and I look forward to hearing from you again.

    Please, however, do you have any sources that are not biased? The National Right to Life website is pretty much leaning in a certain direction. While this does not automatically mean everything it has is biased, it taints it. It means that the information is stacked in a certain direction. Internet research needs to aware of these issues and be able to avoid them.

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  11. Sorry for the NRLC– the official congressional report. I found the original link…but it was kind of ugly and hard to read:

    http:// frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/ cgi-bin /getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_reports&docid= f:hr186.107

    I’m impressed you did a whole post on my comment. Thanks. Gianna Jessen has testified at US congressional hearings, as well as in british parliamentary hearings. I think someone would have discredited her story by now. She’s well-known to people who know abortion on both sides of the aisle.

    http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ health/4500022.stm

    Her point is to stop all abortions. Whether you agree with her or not, it doesn’t help the credibility of anyone at this blog to dismiss her story as a lie. Say its propaganda designed to pull at heart strings in order to convince people that children are children even inside the womb. Say its in effective story for people to use in support of stricter abortion laws…but when you say its a “lie,” it seems like you have your head in the sand.

    Stories like the girl in the video might be rare, but her cause isn’t to address only those cases. Her own story is just corollary to her mission. I think she’s interesting. Yeah, I believe her. She has medical records to prove her story. You haven’t been able to discredit anything just by saying she’s lying.

  12. I had another comment, but it got eaten. This one will be more boring.

    Sorry about the NRLC. I realize it’s biased, but the .gov source was ugly and harder to read. But here it is:

    Gianne Jessen testified in front of US congress and British house of commons. She has a birth certificate signed by the abortionist (from the LA abortion clinic where she was born). She has medical records which say her mother was given a saline injection. When this happens the baby dies and then the mother delivers a dead baby. She was born at 6 am. The abortionist wasn’t supposed to be the office until 9.

    Anyways, I think it’s fine if you all say her story isn’t effective, or it’s propaganda, or whatever. I don’t think her point was that failed abortions happen all the time–

    I just think someone would have discredited her by now if it wasn’t.

  13. Lee, for some reason when there are more than four or five comments the blog eats comments with links in. I have had to remove your links but I will address them at a later date with a new post.

    Thanks.

  14. Ha, go Lee! I find it interesting that there are no counter research links done here, just mocking, dismissive jabs. Kudos to Pomegranate Apple for having the guts to say something as unpopular as truth!

  15. beetlebabee, despite some rumours you may hear, the truth is rarely unpopular (Urban myths aside). However, lies wrapped up as truths are often disliked.

    The entire internet is a counter research link. It would be ludicrous to post every single link that disagrees and, would largely run counter to the purpose of having a blog. Crucially, the links that lee posted are not “research” links – they are an effort to show the validity of limited sources of information.

    I would hate to take away the chance for people to research something themselves, however if you go to wikipedia and search on “Roe v Wade” you can see that the US banned late term abortions prior to 1977.

  16. Perhaps you are right, perhaps truth is only unpopular here. However, if you’re going to have a post decrying someone’s life story as a lie that “makes baby Jesus cry” surely you have some proof?

    “1973 – The U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, declared all the individual state bans on abortion during the first trimester to be unconstitutional, allowed states to regulate but not proscribe abortion during the second trimester, and allowed states to proscribe abortion during the third trimester unless abortion is in the best interest of the woman’s physical or mental health. The Court legalized abortion in all trimesters when a woman’s doctor believes the abortion is necessary for her physical or mental health.”

  17. Beetlebabee you may also find the comments on the follow-up entry useful (www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2008/12/30/the-abortion-debate/#comments) where it was shown that opposition to abortion was not based in the Bible. Whatever the source of Ms Jessen’s convictions are, they are not those of the God described in that book.

    I assume you’re mistaken when you say there is no counter research rather than actively lying.

  18. It has two connections. One is that you stated there was no research in this thread. There was it’s linked to in the comments above.

    The second is that, if you follow the links, Ms Jessen explicitly connects her stance on abortion to Christianity. This is not a justified belief. Her misreading of the book suggests she may also be misreading other facts.

    For example she implies that the process which she described was legal. Again it is shown above this is not the case. Late-term abortions are legal if a birth would endanger the life of the mother. If you follow the links and watch the video this does not seem to be the situation Ms Jessen describes. Now I could shout she is LYING, but she may be mistaken. She hasn’t met her birth mother, she may not know the full details of her birth. Thus she may be wrong without impugning her sincerity

    Of course insincerity can happen. If someone is corrected a couple of times and refuses to engage in any meaningful debate then it could be time to decide they are insincere and merely an ideologue.

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