In April 2004, a nurse named Abby* made an appointment with Richard Collier of the Legal Center for Defense to tell him of an incident she thought violated the Born Alive Infants Protection Act.Abby worked in the labor and delivery department of a major regional hospital in New Jersey. Abby told Collier about a baby boy who was aborted alive there earlier that year and placed in the "dirty room" until he died several hours later....
The boy was between 20-23 weeks old and aborted after a doctor noticed on ultrasound his limbs were not measuring properly. He told the mother the baby would be born with abnormal arms and legs and sword-like feet.
The procedure of choice was induced labor abortion, wherein a pill called Cytotec is inserted in the mother's birth canal every 4-8 hours to irritate the cervix until it opens....
The baby was aborted alive. The nurse noticed he was clutching something in one fist. She pried the baby's fingers opened and saw he was grasping a Cytotec pill....
Collier reported the incident to the U. S. Department of Justice. Abby began reporting other incidents to Collier, who reported them to the DOJ, such as that doctors were ordering nurses to chart live aborted babies' APGAR scores as "zero-zero," indicating they were born dead, not aive....
*pseudonym
Continue reading my column, "DOJ: Betraying aborted-alive babies?", on WND.com.
This is because the Born-Alive act contained no provisions for any penalties for violating it. It was, from the beginning, symbolic. The legal phrase is "without penalty, there is no law." Imagine a law against rape that specified no penalty, just said, "You can't do it." It wouldn't work.
Hadley Arkes has said that at least the govt. should tell these hospitals they could lose federal dollars. That isn't specified in the law, but it could plausibly be imposed as a penalty. Still, the flaw goes back to the fact that the law never specified any penalty whatsoever.