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October 20, 1999

Transcript excerpt from speech by Senator Bob Smith on the floor of the United States Senate, televised nationwide on C-SPAN2, wherein he mentions Jill Stanek and live birth abortions being committed at "Chicago's Christ Hospital."

".... Let's talk about the dirtiest most disgusting secret of all. This is not pleasant... There is a little complication called `live birth.' Uh-oh. Live birth. It happens. When it does, what happens?

I was at an award dinner several years ago when a young woman who is known by many in the right-to-life movement by the name of Gianna Jessen, who then was about 21, so she is probably 25, 26, maybe a little older now. She had been aborted. She was a beautiful girl. She was aborted. There were 1,000 people at this event. She stood up and sang `Amazing Grace.' There wasn't a dry eye in the place, including mine. When it was all over she said: I want all of you to know something. My mother made a terrible mistake because I wanted to live. If I had had mychoice, if I could have said, spare me, I would have said that. I didn't, but I survived, and I am meaningful. I just sang to you. And she said: I love my mother and I forgive her.

There is a lot more power in that than these people that run these clinics that do this.

Why can't we bring this debate to that level? There is no way to know how many live births actually occur. It happens in partial-birth abortions because they are alive until they are executed as they come through the birth canal. Feet first, they are executed; headfirst, they are born. Any difference? Maybe somebody can explain it.

Many of you may have heard of a gentleman by the name of Eric Harrah. About 10 years ago he left the abortion business. One night Eric and his staff were called to the clinic-- remember, he was an abortionist then--because a pregnant girl had given birth in a motel room. The baby was wrapped in a towel. She had been given medication to begin the process of dilation. So it was wrapped in a towel and they thought it was dead, so she came from the motel room carrying this little child in thetowel.

Eric, the abortionist, saw the baby's arm fly up and he screamed, `My God, that baby is alive.'

The doctors sent Rick and the nurse out of the room. When he came back in the baby was dead. A live birth? You might ask yourself, did they take any means to save the child? Or did they kill the child? Who knows? In either case, they let it die.

I have been in this business of doing research on this issue since 1984. I have been involved in the pro-life movement. I have read, I don't know how many thousands of pages. What I am going to read to you now is the worst I
have ever come across in everything and anything that I have read. I have never seen anything to equal it. I do not understand how we can tolerate this in this country, but it shows you how sick we really are. We are sick. Oh, we are sick, collectively, believe me. This is a storyfrom Kelly. A short paragraph, The wholesaler, Kelly, said, `There is something wrong here. They are moving. I don't do this. That's not in my contract.'

She watched the doctor take a bottle of sterile water and fill the pan untilthe water ran up over the babies' mouths and noses. Then she left the room. `I couldn't watch those fetuses moving. That's when I decided it was wrong.'

So the abortionist, twin live births, 6 months--the little girl I spoke to you about earlier who wrote to me was born prematurely at 5 months. Two little twins drowned in a pan so their body parts could be sold because they had an order for the body parts. America.

Many of you may have heard about Jill Stanek , the nurse at Chicago's Christ Hospital who has openly admitted that live births occur at her hospital. We are going to have some testimony from Jill . She will be up here on the Hill very soon so you do not have to believe me; you can listen to her. The hospital staff, when it happens, offer comfort care, which amounts to holding the child until it dies. If they are lucky, they get a little love on the way out. Perhaps it is better than being drowned in a dish.

Jill Stanek says:

What do you call an abortion procedure in which the fetus is born alive, then is left to die without medical care? Infanticide? Murder?

Most people would recoil at just the thought of such a gruesome, uncaring procedure, but it is practiced at least one Chicago suburban hospital. When I called Christ Hospital, the Medical Center at Oak Lawn, I frankly expected a denial that it uses the procedure, but instead the spokeswoman explained it is used for `a variety of second-trimester' abortions when the fetus has not yet reached viability. That's up to 23 weeks of life, when a fetus is considered not yet developed enough to survive on its own.

Instead of medical care, the child is provided `comfort care,' wrapped in a blanket and held when possible.

This is very interesting.

The procedure is chosen by parents and doctors instead of another method in which the fetus is terminated within the womb by, for example, injection with a chemical that stops the heart.

She says further: One day there was a newborn who survived the abortion with no one around to hold it. It was left to die in a soiled-linen closet.

The hospital denies it. She says it happened. Interesting, the hospital saysabortions are elective, but they are done only to protect the life or healthof the mother or when the fetus is nonviable due to extreme prematurity or lethal abnormalities.

The nurse, Jill Stanek , said she has seen some elective abortions done on newborns whose physical or mental defects are deemed incompatible only with the `quality of life.'

That is pretty heavy stuff. This is going on in America. People come down here on this floor, year after year, and defend it. That is what they are doing, defending it: A woman's right to choose. The bassinet or the hospital sterile bucket, which is it? Right--right to choose. Put the child in the bassinet or throw it in the garbage or send it off to some research lab.

Here is a headline, a transcript from the WTVN-TV in Columbus, OH, 20 April, 1999:

Partial-Birth Abortion Baby Survives 3 Hours.

A woman 5 months pregnant came to Women's Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio, to get a partial-birth abortion. During the 3 days it takes to have the procedure she began to have stomach pains and was rushed to a nearby hospital. Within minutes she was giving birth.

Nurse Shelly Lowe in an emergency room at the hospital was shocked when the baby took a gasp of air. [Lowe] `I just held her and it really got to me that anybody could do that to a baby. . .I rocked her and talked to her because I felt that no one should die alone.' The little girl survived 3 hours.

Mark Lally, Director of Ohio Right to Life, believes this is why partial birthabortions should be banned. [Lally] `This shows what we've have been trying to make clear to people. Abortion isn't something that happens just early in pregnancy, it happens in all stages of pregnancy. It's legal in this state any time.' No. 2, My attention was drawn to the fashion in which the requests were made. Over and over again the requests would mention that the tissue must be `fresh'--

It says ship on wet ice. Another one says fresh, remove specimen and prepare within 15 minutes.

This is the process, a doctor talking now:

(a) The baby must in some fashion be killed in its mother's womb. (b) The baby must then be extracted from the womb. (c) It must then be delivered in some fashion to a technician who would then proceed to amputate limbs; extract eyes, brains, hearts, and then process them; (d) all within 10 minutes. I am not an abortionist, nor have I performed an abortion, but to require these procedures to be accomplished in 10 minutes, means of necessity that the baby be extracted as close to life as possible, and would lead to in many cases babies. . .being born living, in order to be able tohave them on ice, or otherwise processed within this short period of time.

As a community physician, I find this barbaric, cruel, evil, and intolerable to the greatest degree. This is a return to the medical practices of the [Nazis] of 1940s. . . .

Can anyone with even the most remote conscience, or moral decency, tolerate this practice?

He closes with that.

Here is a doctor. He is telling us and he is reinforcing everything I have said. Fresh, wet ice, no known abnormalities; get it on the ice. How do you get a fetus that is not chopped up, that is not poisoned? There are only two places. I talked to you about both of them: Live births, partial births.

The dirty little secret is that Planned Parenthood takes Federal taxpayers' dollars. American workers, especially pro-life workers, all of us--but those especially who are pro-life, I am sure, would be opposed to it--are having money taken out of their paychecks to pay for the marketing of babies' body parts. I talked about the $158 million grant from the Federal Government for Planned Parenthood, NIH, $17.6 billion in this year's labor bill--not all for that but just in the bill.

I am not against the funding of the National Institutes of Health, but I think when research is being conducted by the Government, where taxpayer dollars are involved, there is a much higher ethical standard to meet.

In addition, universities receive Federal funding, lots of it. In fact, there are some universities that receive Federal funding specifically for fetal tissue research.

I want to point out one chart that I did not highlight before because this really drives the point home in terms of whether or not there is any particular reason to believe that in the industry they are looking for live births or partial births.

Look what it says on this memo: `Please send list of current frozen tissues.' And they go down the list: Liver and blood and kidney and lung, and all this down here. And then what does it say? No digoxin donors. `No DIG.' That is the term for digoxin donors.

I want you to understand this and think about this: This is an order form. They are saying here: We don't want any digoxin babies.

Well, why don't they want them? Because they cannot sell them. The parts are no good. It is in their own writing. They are incriminating themselves. They are violating the law, and they ought to be prosecuted.

Shine in the light. Bring in the sunshine. Live births are a big problem, but DIG is not good for research. Abortion clinics and harvesters are also deliberately hiding the fact that they are shipping these parts all over the United States. They even use vague language to trick and deceive shippers such as Federal Express who will not do it, to their credit. But they are not told. They are hidden. One marketer says: `We've learned through the years of doing this' how to avoid problems with shippers like Federal Express.

But they have. If you are violating the law, you do everything you can.

As I have gone through this now for I don't know how long here on the floor, you probably say to yourself: Could it get any worse? Can it be any more humiliating?

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