Members of Congress next week have an opportunity to right a travesty of injustice. Every day in the United States, babies are silently screaming in late-term abortions that deprive them of their right to life.
As Congressman Trent Franks told LifeNews.com recently, “More than 18,000 ‘very late term’ abortions are performed every year on perfectly healthy unborn babies in America. These are innocent and defenseless children who can not only feel pain, but who can survive outside of the womb in most cases, and who are torturously killed without even basic anesthesia.”
“Many of them cry and scream as they die, but because it is amniotic fluid going over their vocal cords instead of air, we don’t hear them,” he said.
Not all babies scream silently during abortions. The cries of some babies are hear loud and clear.
A former employee at the abortion clinic Kermit Gosnell ran in Philadelphia described how she heard a baby scream during a live-birth abortion. Abortion clinic employee Sherry West described an incident which “really freaked (her) out” and related to the jury how she heard a child scream who was born alive following an abortion.
West remembered how she referred to the dead children killed in these gruesome abortion procedures as “specimens” so she could avoid the mental trauma associated with knowing how they died. As local media reported:
Sherry West, of Bear, said she was loyal to Gosnell – who is now facing multiple counts of murder for allegedly killing children after they were delivered alive at his clinic – but said the incident “really freaked me out.”
When Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore pressed the 53-year-old West for specifics about the incident, West struggled to answer, clearly uncomfortable with the memory.
“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” West testified, telling a judge and Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at Gosnell’s clinic.
West said she saw the child, whose face and features were not yet completely formed, lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told a co-worker to call Gosnell about it and fled the room.
Congress has an opportunity next week to hear the screams of aborted babies and take action. Republicans in the House of Representatives will hold a vote on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade late this month on a marquee bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy because unborn children feel intense pain in abortions.