October 10, 2023
A favorite slogan of the abortion lobby goes, “Keep the government out of the room with the woman and her doctor” — but what about when a government official was the doctor in that room? A pro-life state representative from Kansas recently shared that exact point of view in a chilling article that described why he co-sponsored the Born Alive Infants Protection Act…because he had seen a baby survive an abortion himself.
In an op-ed published at the Wichita Eagle entitled “I Saw a Baby Survive an Abortion and That’s Why I Sponsored a Law,” State Representative Ron Bryce recounted a personal experience from 1988 that forever changed his perspective. He wrote:
“I was the medical resident on duty at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas when I was called to a “Code Blue.” Typically, when this happens someone is experiencing a life-threatening emergency, such as cardiac arrest. But no one seemed in distress this time. The attending surgeon was not actively providing care. The young woman on the operating table was awake and seemed in no distress.
Melissa Ohden, praying in front of the Supreme Court
“Then there was a cry. I turned to see a premature infant in the corner of the room on a metal table. He had accomplished the seemingly impossible — survived his abortion. Though strong enough to live briefly outside the womb, he was still too young to survive very long separated from his mother. Healthcare had failed to take his life, then subsequently was able to offer very little to help him live.
While many abortionists would leave such a child to die via neglect or even worse, Bryce’s pro-life ethics led him to treat the poor baby as another patient who deserved quality care.
Bryce continued, “I transferred my patient to the Neonatal Intensive Care unit for further care when it became obvious he was too tough to die quickly. Over several hours his breathing grew more labored. He grimaced. Then his grunting quieted, movement ceased, and the grimace passed. I pronounced him dead.”
After further investigating cases such as these, Bryce relayed that he sadly found they weren’t rare. Despite the radical abortion lobby would have you believe, abortion survivors do indeed exist. Like the little boy whose death Bryce witnessed as a medical resident, some don’t make it — others, like founder and CEO of Abortion Survivors Network Melissa Ohden, defy the odds.
SFLAction students demand #ProtectionAtConception
(You can also check out a Students for Life of America blog entitled “Abortion Lobby Smears DeSantis Over Abortion Survivor Story & Looks Like a Loser When She Speaks Up: “I Did Exist.”)
According to the Abortion Survivors Network research, nearly 2,000 infants survive abortions in the United States every year (although without a National Abortion Reporting Law, we can never truly know for sure).
It’s important for the Pro-Life Generation to uplift the real-life stories of abortion survivors to prioritize their protection in law. That’s why Students for Life of America (SFLA) partnered with the Abortion Survivors Network during the 2022-2023 academic year as a SFLA Post-Roe Accelerator partner, awarding the organization $15,000 and working with them grow outreach efforts.
We continue our partnership with them today because as Rep. Bryce pointed out, we cannot fail to give these babies the best of our medical care. After all, they are as much patients as their mothers are — and under the Hippocratic Oath, every patient deserves life-saving care.
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