Do Democrats really support infantcide or are you just a liar?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/o...-abortion.html
I Didn’t Kill My Baby
When he was born, my husband at the time and I knew he couldn’t survive. That doesn’t make me a murderer.
By Jen Gunter
Dr. Gunter is an obstetrician and gynecologist.
On Feb. 5, during the State of the Union address, President Trump implied that women like me executed our babies after birth. On Tuesday, he repeated that same lie on Twitter after the nonsensical Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Act failed to gain enough votes in the Senate to move forward. The bill would have put in place requirements for the care of infants born after failed abortions and might have locked up doctors who failed to comply.
It is unclear how this bill might affect situations where parents decline, for medically appropriate reasons, to have their newborns resuscitated. The threat of criminal prosecution does not enhance anyone’s medical care.
I am an obstetrician and gynecologist who has delivered newborns who could not live, either because they were extremely premature or had birth defects. I have provided abortion care for women after 24 weeks gestation faced with similar outcomes who chose a surgical abortion over a vaginal delivery.
And I also delivered a son who was born to die — my own son.
I am uniquely positioned to say this bill is medically unnecessary and nothing more than a way to warp the reality of perinatal mortality (stillbirth or death within the first week of life) to create confusion about abortion.
Having a child born to die on his or her birthday is a unique tragedy.
While some parents may insist on heroic measures, many of us, after counseling from neonatologists, specialists in high-risk pregnancies and other medical professionals decide that a blanket and an embrace is the highest quality care we can give our baby.
But this reality — my reality — has been twisted by Mr. Trump and pundits to sound as if doctors like me and parents like me are smothering full-term babies at birth or injecting them with dirty needles to kill them (filled with what I have no idea).
According to the president, we are executioners.
If you are going to accuse me of executing my child, then you need to know exactly what happened. It’s not a pleasant story and the ending is terrible. I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to read it. But you need to know the truth, because stories like mine are being perverted for political gain.
It pains me to remember. And yet, it is the only memory of my son, and so even though it cuts, I keep it close.
I was pregnant with triplets and at 22 weeks and three days, my membranes ruptured — that is, my water broke, far too early. I knew it was catastrophic. Almost no baby born before 23 weeks can survive.
With the knowledge that I would probably be a parent for only a few minutes, I headed to the hospital. I told my husband at the time that it would be all right, that maybe I was wrong.
I lied. It was easier on me.
After we consulted with a high-risk obstetrician and a neonatologist, I heard the dismal news I had expected: The survival rate for male triplets at 22 weeks and three days was less than 1 percent.
And so I waited. I waited to bestow the names I had so carefully chosen on three boys who seemed destined to die at birth.
For a day nothing happened. That was cruel because I began to hope that maybe I could hang on for a few weeks and maybe one or more would survive. I couldn’t help but indulge in the fantasy. And I resented that hope because I knew the worst day of my life was almost here.
I know other parents in similar situations also cling to hope. I have delivered those women; sometimes their wrenching sobs push their child who is born to die into the world. Maybe their child had a lethal birth defect. Maybe their child was extremely premature, like my Aidan. There are a lot of ways a newborn can be born to die.
After a fitful night of sleep at the hospital — because when you know Death is standing at the doorway waiting for your baby, you don’t sleep well — I got up to use the bathroom.
And then, all alone, I realized I was delivering. There was no time to cry out. I stood alone in the hospital bathroom and delivered my own son. He fit in my hands.
I must have made a sound. Someone came running. Then I was in a bed and people flooded the room, tending to my bleeding and assessing the situation. Obstetrically, it was a nightmare. Although maybe, just maybe, they could do something to prevent me from delivering my other two, so I wouldn’t lose three children on one day.
A nurse tended to Aidan. I saw him through the forest of people and intravenous poles.
And then a nurse parted everyone and brought him to me wrapped in a blanket. He was dying, she said. Did I want to hold him?
I was being poked and prodded. Needles piercing my skin. Drugs for sedation. I was being held down (I don’t resent that; I just couldn’t cooperate, and I know it was an emergency and everyone was really trying). A speculum was also in my vagina, opened wide so a doctor — a friend of mine trying not to cry — trimmed Aidan’s umbilical cord dangling from his placenta that was still inside my uterus.
I tell myself it was all those things that prevented me from holding him, but I know the truth.
I wasn’t brave enough.
If I held him and saw him die, then I would know exactly what I was going to face if the other two delivered (ultimately, my other two sons survived).
As Aidan’s parents we had decided that invasive procedures, like intravenous lines and a breathing tube in a one-pound body, would be pointless medical care. And so, as we planned, Aidan died.
And that is the reality for so many parents. Some have known for weeks or even months that there will be no life after birth. With that knowledge some choose an abortion and others the blanket and embrace. Both are brave decisions.
And then there are others, like me, who have a day or less to prepare for that unwelcome reality. A brief life. Comfort. And then death.
It's unclear if the bill the Senate was considering would have affected me at 22 1/2 weeks. But whether an extremely premature delivery at the cusp of viability or an abortion, it's a situation that the government shouldn't insert itself into.
The trauma of seeing my son die was so great that I had to give up obstetrics. I did not have the fortitude to sit in that same room where I lost him and deliver someone else’s baby, possibly a baby born to die.
It was years before I could look at a new mother being wheeled to the hospital entrance with her baby. Even now I often leave the hospital through another exit so I won’t see the new mothers.
Some things just break you.
Politicians who twist the memory of a birth followed by a death to score political points and mislead about the reality of both abortion and newborns who are born to die should be ashamed of themselves.
No one is executing children at birth. Doctors are providing standard medical care.
Pregnancy terminations at or after 24 weeks of gestation, the time largely accepted as viability, are typically performed because of severe fetal anomalies or fetal anomalies combined with maternal health problems.
I wish so much that I could have had an anesthetic and then woken up. That I hadn’t felt and seen my son being delivered. Some days it plays repeatedly in my head. Some memories are just that painful.
Some of us are faced with one of the hardest decisions of all at the very instant we become parents. We are just trying to do our best for our baby born to die.
Quality medical care can be a blanket and an embrace.