CHICAGO - Chicago's Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine is highly respected worldwide. So when a medical instructor in the school's obstetrics and gynecology department makes public statements about the quandary abortionists find themselves in regarding whether to end a baby's life before or after abortion, his colleagues listen.
"We do recommend feticidal injections after a certain gestational age, but interestingly, only because we don’t believe that we can guarantee at the extremes of gestational age, depending on dating, that [they] won’t be subject to resuscitation against the patient’s wishes," said Northwestern University associate professor Cassing Hammond, M.D., at a National Abortion Federation conference in San Francisco.
Hammond's comments at the 2014 conference were secretly recorded by the Center for Medical Progress. He suggests that Northwestern University is teaching their Ob-Gyn students an abortion technique in which babies are injected with life-ending digoxin while still in their mothers' wombs, presenting a lifeless infant when born, rather than abortionists dealing with the dilemma of a baby born alive, possibly needing to be resuscitated.
On the video, Hammond discussed the controversy of when to inject digoxin - a problem for those research arms desiring developed fetal remains for experimentation. Most researchers do not want human remains poisoned by digoxin. On the panel, Hammond says:
Gestational limits.
We are constantly trying to defend what gestational age limit, within our institution, it is proper to offer abortion services. The two chief places this comes from are Department Chairmen and again, Nursing Administration, and they come at it from different vantage points, and I’ve learned over time you have to be prepared for these vantage points.
Department Chairmen, then to come at this from a stand point of, we offer Caesarean sections at this gestational age, so why would we ever offer terminations at a later gestational age than that earliest age? In other words, if we’ll do a section at 22 weeks, why are we going to 24 weeks for D&Es [dilation and extractions]?
Nursing tends to come at it from a different vantage point and I think the panel has picked up on this. The aesthetics of the procedure. Our labor floor nurses have many times argued that they don’t like seeing D&E procedures or abortion procedures and they want feticidal injections before a certain gestational age or don’t want to be involved with procedures of a certain gestational age.
We do recommend feticidal injections after a certain gestational age, but interestingly, only because we don’t believe that we can guarantee at the extremes of gestational age, depending on dating, that [they] won’t be subject to resuscitation against the patient’s wishes.
I wish I could say otherwise at our institution, but we recommend feticidal injection after a certain gestational age, but that is always the patient’s prerogative to refuse.
Hammond's comments are among those released by the GotNews online media group in late October, one of the remaining undercover videos recorded by the Center for Medical Progress.
Those videos were one of the most talked about stories in 2015. The series of undercover videos released by the Center for Medical Progress exposed how abortionists talk about their practices, and their activity of selling body parts of aborted babies to researchers for medical experimentation.
Planned Parenthood came under intense pressure for several weeks due to the revelations of several of their officials, and there was a call to end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood - of which several affiliates are involved in the marketing of body parts - but in the end, nothing changed.
The agreed upon budget that passed Congress before the holiday break included funding for Planned Parenthood. Republicans argued that the President would have vetoed any restrictions on Planned Parenthood, thus, there was no need to hold out with President Obama in the Oval Office.
Warning: The video with Hammond's comments at the end contain other graphic comments that may be offensive:
