A tear-stained face in the other crowd
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Examiner Columnist
January 25, 2009
Angele came to Washington last week, but she was not one of the multitude who converged on the nation's capital to joyously proclaim their support of the new president on his Inauguration Day. Angele came with the other crowd.
Just two days after Barack Obama was sworn-in as the first African American president, hundreds of thousands of protestors returned for the annual March for Life - the largest and longest mass protest in U.S. history. For 36 years, they've been in a quixotic quest to convince Congress, the Supreme Court, and every administration since Richard Nixon's to protect the civil rights of unborn children even their own mothers don't want. It's been a hard sell.
By any logical measure, Angele - a strikingly attractive woman in her thirties with long hair and a model's cheekbones - should have been on the sidelines, protesting against the marchers. After all, the divorced mother of two had been raped and subsequently exercised her choice to have a mid-trimester abortion. But things didn't quite go according to plan.
On April 1, 2005, she told me, she went to an abortion clinic in Orlando, Florida to terminate the pregnancy. A physician induced labor, but clinic employees forgot to administer the digoxin intended to stop the fetal heart. The next day, she delivered a 1 lb. 1 oz. baby boy in a toilet in the clinic's grimy restroom. He was still alive.
She can't explain what happened next. No longer a fetus, the tiny boy was now legally a person under federal law and entitled to constitutional protection under the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. She screamed for help as she stroked and sang to the infant she had tried to kill the day before. When she realized that clinic employees would not help her save him, she had a friend call 911, but help never came.
Angele's disturbing experience was captured in a short but harrowing film entitled "22 Weeks," shown last week at Union Station's Phoenix Theater. Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in the Supreme Court's controversial 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, was in the audience.She has since joined the pro-life cause.
The 2002 federal Born Alive Act, which passed the Senate 98-0, was supposed to make sure such horrors never happen. But they do. In 2006, an 18-year-old woman who gave birth in the waiting room of a Hialeah, Florida abortion clinic says an employee snatched her newborn daughter and threw her into a biohazard bag filled with bleach while another employee called the police. The clinic -whose owner lost her license for allowing medical students and even a janitor to perform abortions in another facility in Miramar - was later closed.
Jill Stanek, head of BornAliveTruth.org, says the law is seldom, if ever enforced.Stanek, you might remember, is the Chicago nurse who cradled another infant who survived an abortion for 45 minutes in a hospital utility room where he was left alone to die. Since this happened about twice a month in her hospital, the numbers nationwide are higher than anyone ever imagined.
Stanek singlehandedly forced Obama's campaign to admit on Aug. 18, 2008 that he had been lying when he denied being one of just two members of the Illinois Senate to vote against a bill with virtually identical language to the Born Alive Act. Obama had previously denied the charge, saying: "For people to suggest that I and the Illinois Medical Society...were somehow in favor of withholding life saving support from an infant born alive is ridiculous. It defies common sense and it defies imagination..." Yet he voted to do just that - three times.
Obama has also promised supporters that he will sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would undo all of the restrictions on abortion, such as parental notification, passed by duly elected state legislatures. FOCA would also force medical professionals to perform a procedure some find morally and ethically abhorrent. How do pro-choicers who argue that women should be free to make reproductive decisions according to their consciences reconcile that belief with legislation that would force health care providers to violate theirs?
Angele knows that her desperate attempt to save the product of a rape she tried to dispose of the day before doesn't make sense. But there it is.
"I miss him terribly," she says now. "I hold myself fully accountable for my so-called choice. But I'll never be at peace. The circumstances surrounding my son's conception were not his fault. He shared my DNA. He was my child. I just let fear rule."
She called him Rowan. His life outside her womb was only 11 minutes long. Yet nearly four years later, she wants other women to know, she still weeps at the thought of him.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner's local opinion editor.She can be reached by email at: bhollingsworth@dcexaminer.com
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