Just awful

From the London Times:

A government agency is launching an inquiry into doctors’ reports that up to 50 babies a year are born alive after botched National Health Service abortions.

The investigation, by the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH), comes amid growing unease among clinicians over a legal ambiguity that could see them being charged with infanticide...

...Doctors are increasingly uneasy about aborting babies who could be born alive. “If viability is the basis on which they set the 24-week limit for abortion, then the simplest answer is to change the law and reduce the upper limit to 18 weeks,” said Campbell, who last year published a book showing images of foetuses’ facial expressions and “walking” movements taken with a form of 3-D ultrasound.

Article.

This happens in America, too. In fact, it happens often enough that in 2000 the Congress passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which stated that children who made it outside the womb could not simply be killed or left to die without medical care. The congressional testimony included horrible stories from nurses who witnessed botched abortions, where the newborn child was often simply left to die - Jill Stanek, Shelley Lowe etc. Of course, that didn't stop thirteen Democrats - and TWO REPUBLICANS - in the U.S. House from voting against the bill. It nevertheless passed, 380-15; the Senate later also approved the bill, 98-0.

The fact that this had to be addressed at all is sickening enough, I'd say.