Who is Jill Stanek?

Who is Jill Stanek and why should you care?

Ms. Stanek is the woman who blew the whistle on Illinois’ practice of letting babies who were born alive after a botched abortion die mercilessly and alone.

David Freddoso introduces us to her in his National Review article about Barack Obama published yesterday. He begins like this:

The tiny newborn baby made very little noise as he struggled to breathe. He lacked the strength to cry. He had been born four months premature.

“At that age,” says nurse Jill Stanek, “their lungs haven’t matured.”

Stanek is the nurse who found herself cradling this baby in her hands for all of his 45-minute lifetime. He was close to ten inches long and weighed perhaps half a pound. It’s just a guess — no one had weighed or measured him at birth. No happy family had been there to welcome him into the world. No one was trying to save his life now, putting him into an incubator, giving him oxygen or nourishment. He had just been left to die…

Stanek says her friend had been told to take this baby and leave him in a soiled utility closet. She offered to take him instead. “I couldn’t let him die alone,” she says.

Stanek was horrified by this experience. This was not an abortion — it was something worse. Could it be legal to take a living and breathing person of any size, already born and outside his mother’s womb, and just leave him to die, without any thought of treatment?

This experience so haunted Ms. Stanek that she decided she had to do something to stop it. After hospital administrators at the United Church of Christ Hospital (how’s that for irony) dismissed her concerns, she spoke to the Illinois attorney general and then to Illinois state senator Patrick O’Malley. It was through Ms. Stanek’s efforts the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was conceived.

The BAIPA was designed to save the lives of babies who, in spite of doctors’ best efforts to kill them through abortion, are born alive. This bill required that doctors give the same medical care and treatment to babies born alive because of botched abortions the same life saving medical treatment as any other human being.

Sounds like a no brainer, right? Not to one Illinois state senator. As Mr. Freddoso so effectively put it, Ms. Stanek’s “attempt to change a corrupt medical practice and bring hope to defenseless infants would put her on a collision course with a state senator named Barack Obama.”

Obama voted against the BAIPA. To defend himself, he said he only voted against it because it didn’t have a pre-birth neutrality clause that the federal bill did, an excuse Ed Morrissey at Hot Air skewered Obama’s defense in his post here. A portion:

Clearly, Obama lied about his position.  It’s no small rhetorical matter, either.  His vote puts him on the extreme of the pro-abortion camp, so extreme in fact that not a single member of Congress would follow his example.  Obama voted to allow Christ Hospital and other facilities performing abortions to allow live children to die.

David Freddoso’s piece included Obama’s statement on why he voted against the bill:

There was some suggestion that we might be able to craft something that might meet constitutional muster with respect to caring for fetuses or children who were delivered in this fashion. Unfortunately, this bill goes a little bit further, and so … this is probably not going to survive constitutional scrutiny. Number one, whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — a child, a nine-month-old — child that was delivered to term. That determination, then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.

In other words, Obama argued that the babies who are born alive after a botched abortion must be left to die because if we were to acknowledge that they were living human beings prior to the full nine months gestation, then the legality of abortion could be threatened. So Obama has no issue sacrificing the lives of these babies to protect abortion.

Mr. Freddoso’s rebuttal to Obama’s argument is spot on:

But even this is not the most important part of his argument. That would be his first sentence — the one about “caring for fetuses or children who were delivered in this fashion.” He seems open to this idea. And he does not state explicitly that a pre-viable, premature baby is not a “person.” Rather, he is arguing that the question of their personhood is a moot point. Even if the state should perhaps provide care for these babies, any recognition of their personhood might threaten someone’s right to an abortion somewhere down the road. That made the bill unacceptable to him.

And this is one of the many reasons why Obama is an unacceptable candidate for president. His views on abortion are so extreme that they blur the line between that and infanticide.

Learn more about Barack Obama in David Freddoso’s new book The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate