COMFORTABLY DEAD

"There is no pain, you are receding..."

Illinois, 2002. A nurse working at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois (the really rich part of Chicago) testifies before the Illinois state legislature about a big change made in the hospital. Instead of leaving children that were born still living as part of an abortion attempt in a utility room until they die, Christ Hospital built a special "Comfort Room."

We now have this prettily wallpapered room complete with a First Foto machine, baptismal gowns, a footprinter and baby bracelets, so that we can offer keepsakes to parents of their aborted babies. There is even a nice wooden rocker in the room to rock live aborted babies to death.

The nurse was Jill Stanek, and she'd testified in 2001 about the death of born babies in Christ Hospital, a place apparently long departed from its name and founder's intent. Here's an excerpt from that testimony (as is the above quote):

In the event that a baby is aborted alive at Christ Hospital, he or she is not given any medical care, but is rather given what my hospital calls “comfort care." “Comfort care” is defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until the baby dies, although until recently even this was not always done. The baby is then offered to the parents to hold until he or she dies.

If the parents do not want to hold their dying aborted baby, as is most often the case, it is left to nursing staff or support staff on the floor to hold the baby until he or she dies. And, until this past December, when staff did not have time or the desire to hold the baby, the baby was taken to our Soiled Utility Room and left there alone to die. Christ Hospital's comfort care policy, #WHS492, only requires that live aborted babies be checked for signs of life once an hour, or “as needed in order to verify time of death.”

It is not uncommon for a live aborted babies to linger for an hour or two or even longer. At Christ Hospital, one of these babies once lived for almost an entire eight-hour shift. Last year alone, of the 13 babies that I am aware of who were aborted at Christ Hospital, at least four lived between 1-1/2 to 3 hours, two boys and two girls. Christ Hospital says that it compassionately aborts babies with very serious mental or physical handicaps. But Christ Hospital will also abort for life or health of the mother. So at least two of the second-trimester babies who were aborted last year, for instance, were completely healthy.

One night, a nursing coworker 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.

She was part of the testimony regarding a new bill called the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which was to protect infants born alive as a result of an abortion attempt. For some reason, the law did not deem a baby born alive to be a person or a human being deserving of full human rights in this situation. Born to an abortion? Well, you're not actually human then. We set out to kill the lump of unviable, parasitic tissue, so born or not it must die. It's one of those wierd loopholes in child birth that the law has developed over time to protect abortion and still protect babies, sort of. In California and New York state it is considered a double homicide if you kill a pregnant woman and her unborn baby. But if she asks you to kill her unborn baby, it's just abortion and perfectly legal. If you kill the unborn baby without asking, it's homicide. Thus the tangled and confusing web of lies and law we've constructed around the desire to make abortion legal.

So the Illinois state legislature set out to craft just such a bill that extended protection to these babies, as if that wasn't already a painfully obvious requirement of law and any sane sense of ethics.

The first bill didn't pass, and then state Senator Obama explained why he didn't vote for it: because it lacked a "neutrality" clause that stated explicitly that this was not in any form or interpretation a ban on abortion. Basically it said that just because the bill clearly describes a baby that is born as a human being, a person deserving of legal protection and life that doesn't somehow mean that babies are human beings and persons deserving of legal protection and life. That there's a magical line between being born and being unborn that supernaturally transforms the unviable foetus into a human being when they exit the mother.

When challenged on his vote on this bill in 2004 by Alan Keyes, Senator Obama claimed he was all for the bill, but without that clause it was just a back door attempt to make abortion illegal and he sadly has to vote against it on constitutional grounds.

"At the federal, level there was a similar bill that passed because it had an amendment saying this does not encroach on Roe v. Wade," Obama said. "I would have voted for that bill."

The problem is, the bill had that clause in it, and Senator Obama himself was one of the ones who added it on to the text of the legislation. The pdf of this addition can be found here. With other Democratic legislators, he added the very clause he claimed was missing, then voted against the bill, later claiming it was because that clause wasn't in it.

The complete text of the original bill can be found here (before the amendment mentioned above was passed) and the discussion in which Senator Obama notes he'll vote "present" (which means "no" but sounds nicer when it's brought up later). The later amendment was added in, replacing lines 24-26.

The following year, the bill came up again for a vote, and this time it wasn't killed in committee. Jil Stanek testified once more, and Senator Barack Obama recalled her previous testimony, bringing up the comfort room:

Ms. Stanek, your initial testimony last year showed your dismay at the lack of regard for human life. I agreed with you last year, and we suggested that there be a Comfort Room or something of that nature be done. The hospital acknowledged that and changes were made and you are still unimpressed. It sounds to me like you are really not interested in how these fetuses are treated, but rather not providing absolutely any medical care or life to them.

State Senator Obama was correct that she didn't care about the building of a room to make it seem nice that these babies were left to die - since the Comfort Room he claims he suggested in 2001 had already been built in December 2000. Her testimony was that they now already had such a room and that it was ghastly. Yet he implies that it was built based on his suggestion and that somehow she's unreasonable for not being mollified by this because she's the one who brought it up in the first place. The bill eventually did pass, when Senator Obama was no longer in the legislature. There's pro-abortion, and then there's pro-abortion.

So what kind of hospital creates a special pretty baby room for babies to lie in and die? Then gives keepsakes and little mementos to the parents of their murdered baby? The kind of hospital like Christ Hospital Illinois who has these people on the board of directors:

• Dr. Jane Fisler-Hoffman member of Trinity United Church of Christ and board member of Christ Hospital's parent company, Advocate Health Care
• Christ Hospital CEO Carole Schneider, a TUCC member
• Or by Rev. Dr. Ozzie Smith Jr., former associate pastor at TUCC under Rev. Jeremiah Wright
• Reverend Wright, who sat on the board of Christ Hospital's parent company from 1986-89

The legacy media and Senator Obama are hoping you've forgotten all about Trinity United Church of Christ, which he was a member of for more than two decades until earlier this year. The church he loves and would still be a member of, according to his statement, but he left only because it was causing the church problems during his election campaign. They want you to forget Reverend Wright's bitter, hateful, racist, and anti-American rants that Senator Obama sat under for decades and praised until it became obvious that he was a political liability.

That church and it's membership backs the hospital's policy and worked to create the comfort room. They don't have a problem with killing fully born babies if it was the result of an abortion. They have a problem with how it looked to have the babies die in a utility room. Now there's a nice pretty new place to die horribly in and Senator Obama is telling lies about his vote and position on the topic. He even lied in the Illinois senate when Jill Stanek testified again.

Perhaps we could say Obama lies, and children die?

Senator Obama, Abortion, Babies