A baby boy abandoned by doctors to die after a botched abortion was found alive nearly a day later.
The 22-week infant died one day later in intensive care at a hospital in the mother’s home town of Rossano in southern Italy.
The mother, pregnant for the first time, had opted for an abortion after prenatal scans suggested that her baby was disabled.
However, the infant survived the procedure, carried out on Saturday in the Rossano Calabro hospital, and was left by doctors to die.
He was discovered alive the following day – some 20 hours after the operation – by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.
He found that the baby, wrapped in a sheet with his umbilical cord still attached, was moving and breathing.
The priest raised the alarm and doctors immediately arranged for the infant to be taken to a specialist neo-natal unit at the neighbouring Cosenza hospital, where he died on Monday morning.
[…]More than 200,000 abortions are performed each year, most for non-medical reasons within the legal upper limit of 24 weeks gestation.
The increasing number of babies surviving below 24 weeks, partly because of advances in medicine, has led to widespread calls for the legal upper limit to be further reduced.
Attempts to lower the limit failed in Parliament in 2008.
In 2005 a baby boy in Manchester was born alive at 24 weeks after surviving three attempts to abort him. He is now a five-year-old schoolboy.
It’s not good. If I have to give up sex before marriage in order to avoid committing acts of evil like this, then I will do it. I cannot allow myself to do anything that would expose an innocent unborn child to be harmed in this, just so that I can have momentary pleasure. Abortion is one of the main reasons why I am chaste. I believe in love, romance and courting. I don’t believe in recreational sex. It’s just not worth the risk. Not only does it hurt women when you pull away from them, but you can even cause worse evil. There are other things to do with women than to victimize them with premarital sex, and to risk the lives of unborn children, too.
The pursuit of pleasure must stop short of violating someone else’s right to life.
WINTERY KNIGHT 