By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Along city streets you see fast-food outlets, grocery stores, day-care drop-offs, restaurants, office-supply stores, home-improvement big boxes, apparel shops, florists, a regional bus line’s terminal, and pizza, pizza, pizza.
It’s the panoply of modern commerce just around the corner from your home, competing for attention with big windows and bright lighting, boasting of their excellence to lure you into opening your wallet.
Businesses vying for notice are today’s equivalent of the three-ring circus under the big tent. How lucky if a television reporter happens to stop by, looking for some feature-story material.
What if the worker behind the counter were to say about the food or the flowers, “I’d prefer not to talk about it”? “I really can’t go over what we do here”? “This is sort of touchy to get into”? “I’m not comfortable discussing this”?
That’d be even stranger if this reluctant business had been lauded as a provider of basic constitutional rights by no less than the U.S. Supreme Court.
But that’s the paradox of the 21st century abortion clinic that slinked in to the strip mall, trying to normalize the abnormal by blending into the everyday.
The enterprise may be right across the neighborhood street from a toddlers’ nursery or pet store, but at some level it realizes its shame. Including when it fails to deliver the goods by accidentally delivering a live baby.
It’s no secret that abortionists prefer to avoid “the dreaded complication,” survivors. Indeed, extremist Barack Obama sullied himself as an Illinois state senator by fighting against legislation requiring medical care for survivors. The possibility of being stuck with a survivor would discourage abortion, Obama argued in his characteristically pedantic dreadful way.
Some survivors like Gianna Jessen and Melissa Ohden grow up to speak up for still-threatened little ones. Jessen, aborted alive in 1977, even confronted Obama through an advertising message during his 2008 presidential campaign, saying that if her fate were left to him, she wouldn’t be here.
The fact of abortion survivals has been underscored by pro-life probers like Lila Rose’s Live Action organization. In 2013 it released an investigative series, “Inhuman: Undercover in America’s Late-Term Abortion Industry” (liveaction.org/inhuman/).
One of the abortuaries exposed was Family Planning Associates Medical Group, in a four-story medical building on North Seventh Street in Phoenix, just north of the I-10 freeway that passes through downtown on the way to California.
An undercover investigator who’s 23.5 weeks pregnant quizzes abortionist Laura Mercer there about what happens to the baby. The abortionist replies that it’s cremated and the ashes are spread in the desert or foothills. (That’s something to think about on your next hike past the saguaros.)
Mercer lies that “it doesn’t even look like a baby yet.” Does it have a face? “You know, kind of.”
Then the investigator asks counselor Linda, “Will they resuscitate it? Like, will I have to take care of it?” The counselor shakes her head no and says, “Uh-uh.”
She adds, “Sometimes they are, yeah,” alive. “They will not resuscitate.”
Not only was this callous type of talk exposed in the subsequent video, but pro-life activist Rose spoke to a rally of about 250 people in front of that abortuary on June 6, 2013. She said in a news release then:
“The testimony we’ve documented in this abortion facility strongly suggests that staff there are committing infanticide. The Family Planning Associates Medical Group needs to be investigated immediately, and de-licensed.”
The abortuary had to face the fact it was under scrutiny.
On the evening of February 27, 2016, about 50 Phoenix-area pro-lifers gathered for a sidewalk prayer vigil outside Banner University Medical Center at 1111 E. McDowell Rd. Word had spread among them that a baby apparently survived an abortion the previous day at the nearby Seventh Street abortuary, which phoned 911.
The Phoenix Fire Department provided emergency transport to that hospital.
Pro-lifers called the infant Baby Chava, the Hebrew word for “life.” Due to patient confidentiality rules, they didn’t know if the baby still was alive.
Two nights later the news website of The Arizona Republic, AzCentral, reported that the “fetus was transported to Banner Medical Center with no fetal heart tones and was pronounced dead immediately after arrival, according to a statement from Phoenix police.”
Had the baby really survived, at 21 weeks or greater? As a pro-lifer observed, abortion clinics see lots of dead babies, and they hate to call ambulances. Abortion clinics don’t call ambulances for dead babies.
Time passed. As May was drawing toward a close, the 911 February phone-call tape from the abortuary was released. The caller, who works at an abortion clinic and whose paycheck comes from abortions performed, didn’t like to use the word abortion, not even to describe the clinic itself.
She also didn’t like to use the word “baby,” even though “fetus” is a medical term for the baby only before birth. To use the word “fetus” for a surviving baby makes no more sense than to refer to a living person as a “corpse.” However, “fetus” can be a dehumanizing word to distance oneself from the reality that one’s job involves killing defenseless babies all the time.
The caller tells the emergency dispatcher on February 26, “We are a termination clinic. There was a termination that was performed.”
“There is a fetus who…is breathing right now. So we need…someone to do services.”
“The fetus is breathing, so we need care for it now.”
“We can’t provide that care, except for oxygen, and we’re trying to keep the fetus stable until someone arrives.”
Clinics that do late abortions should be prepared for the possibility they’ll have survivors, blogger Christina Dunigan wrote on May 24 at “Real Choice: Preparing for a Post-Roe America” as she referred to this incident. She wrote:
“Of course, the pro-life response to such a happening is to stop aborting these babies in the first place. However, it seems common sense that if a facility is aborting potentially viable babies, they have a responsibility to be prepared for live births. At minimum, there should be means of keeping the baby safe and warm while administering oxygen, and a written emergency plan, reviewed as often as other emergency plans, for providing necessary support while awaiting an ambulance.”
The dominant media tactic is to dismiss the grisly routine facts of permissive abortion. This helps abortion workers deaden their consciences. When they’re caught in the public glare, they can grow shamefaced.
Ducking And Evading
The Live Action “Inhuman” video investigation also includes footage of deftly groomed Planned Parenthood representative Alisa LaPolt Snow testifying before Florida state legislators in 2013. Asked what abortion providers do with a surviving baby struggling to live, she ducks and evades. She looks like she’d rather be eating nails.
When she says the patient’s wishes should prevail, a legislator replies that it seems the struggling child is the patient at that point.
“That’s a very good question. I really don’t know how to answer that,” she replies.
Alisa LaPolt Snow struggles a lot. But not as much as surviving babies that abortionists prefer to deny care to. At least she wasn’t sent to the crematory, to be scattered in the desert or foothills.
One day, each member of the abortion industry will face Someone with even more authority than state legislators. Then He’ll demand answers they won’t be able to duck. And dominant media won’t be able to shield them.
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