Pat Maloney, the pro-life blogger who blogs at “Run with Life,” has another tragic update about Canada’s abortion regime.
“Last year there were 127 live-birth abortions,” she wrote. “This year there were 149. That’s an increase of 22 babies born alive after a late-term abortion. Six of these babies were greater than 29 weeks’ gestation.” Live-birth abortions are abortions where a child is born “resulting from termination of pregnancy” and then left to die. This is happening every year in Canada.
Not just in Canada, either. This week at Gript, veteran Irish pro-life activist Niamh Uí Bhriain revealed that the Irish government’s “review of the operation of the 2018 abortion law has found that babies are being born alive after abortion – and may be denied even comfort care after the procedure failed to end their lives.” Again, this means that the children born during an abortion are left to die – and the government report, authored by barrister Marie O’Shea, notes that “some paediatricians and neonatologists do not want to be involved in assisting these babies.”
This is simply the latest revelation in a growing body of evidence indicating that Ireland’s abortion regime, like abortion regimes in other Western countries, sometimes blurs the lines between abortion (killing the baby inside the womb) and infanticide (killing the baby outside the womb). There is no moral difference between abortion and infanticide, but there is allegedly a legal difference. But babies who survive abortion exist – albeit briefly – in a cruel gray area, and doctors tasked with ending their lives are frequently unsure of how to respond.
Uí Bhriain notes that Gript reported on a paper by researchers published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology last year that examined the experiences of pro-abortion medical professionals and found that “the specialists carrying out abortion were frustrated by conflict with neonatologists and were ‘unclear’ as to who will look after those babies if a baby was ‘born alive following an abortion by induction of labor and without feticide.’” In other words, labor was induced before the baby could survive outside the womb so that the baby would die – and the question of care for these babies has become a point of conflict.
