The Holy Innocents: Yesterday & Today

Aborted Child Born Alive, Left to Die; Obama Was Okay With That

by AWR Hawkins | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 5/24/12 10:17 AM


In Vietnam, a family is distraught because their child was born alive, covered in blankets by the hospital, and left to die.

In a twisted scenario where one bad decision led to even worse results, the parents had been convinced to abort their child after seeing ultra-sounds that showed troubling birth defects. After the abortion, the child was placed in a bed under blankets until the family could return to recover the body. But upon returning and removing the blankets, family members saw the child and realized the ultrasounds had been wrong—the child had been born healthy. Moreover, the child was still alive.

However, the child had been bleeding profusely, and although the hospital immediately began working to save the child’s fleeting life, in the end nothing could be done to save it.

Had this terrible situation arisen in Illinois when Barack Obama was a state senator, it would have been illegal for doctors or nurses to try to save the child once it was discovered alive. For as an Illinois state senator, Obama “voted four times against legislation to protect and care for infants accidentally born alive during late-term abortions.” As Erik Erickson has said: “Obama did not think that a child who was alive and outside the mother’s womb should be considered a child for the purposes of giving the child equal protection rights if it was the mother and doctor’s intention that the child be killed.”

In other words, where death was intended no life could be salvaged.

Thus, it came as no surprise that a House Judiciary Report from 2000 said physicians at one prominent hospital in Chicago had been aborting “healthy infants and infants with non-fatal deformities [and although] many of these babies…lived for hours after birth, no efforts [were] made to determine if any of them could have survived with appropriate medical assistance.”

In one specific example from an Illinois hospital, an aborted baby “left to die on the counter of the soiled utility room wrapped in a disposable towel, was accidentally thrown in the garbage.” Later, when hospital staff realize what had happened and begin looking for the child, they “were going through the trash [and] the baby fell out of the towel and on to the floor.”

I’m a bit confused here: Is this part of Obama’s promise of “hope and change” or simply a precursor of his pledge to “fundamentally change America”?

Think again about the child in Vietnam. There, the discovery of a live baby was a traumatizing experience to which everyone responded by trying to save the child’s life: the room was frantic with people fighting for life. But in Chicago, Illinois—which was Obama’s Illinois—it would have been illegal to try to save the child’s life, just as it was illegal to try to save the life of any child who’d survived abortion.

Here’s the bottom line: In Vietnam an aborted child was born alive, but left to die—just like Obama would have wanted it.

LifeNews Note: AWR Hawkins is weekly contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s “BIG” sites, a columnist for Pajamas Media, and a contributor to RedCounty.com. He holds a PhD in US military history from Texas Tech University. This column originally appeared at TownHall.







ART & ARCHITECTURE



The Massacre of the Innocents in 10 Works of Artby SPL STAFF on Dec 28, 2012 • 4:00 amNo Comments


Listers, each year on December 28th the Roman Catholic Church celebrates those who died instead of the infant Christ. The “Holy Innocents” are recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel 2:16-18:

Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry; and sending killed all the men children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying: A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.

Catholic Encyclopedia explains, “The Church venerates these children as martyrs (flores martyrum); they are the first buds of the Church killed by the frost of persecution; they died not only for Christ, but in his stead (St. Aug., “Sermo 10us de sanctis”). In connection with them the Apostle recalls the words of the Prophet Jeremias (xxxi, 15) speaking of the lamentation of Rachel.”1





“The Holy Innocents” by Giotto, c. 1304-6.






“Massacre of the Innocents” a 10th century illuminated manuscript.






“The Massacre of the Innocents at Bethlehem” by Matteo di Giovanni, 1488.






Cornelis van Haarlem, “Massacre of the Innocents,” 1590.







Peter Paul Rubens, “Massacre of the Innocents” c. 1610-12.






François-Joseph Navez, “Massacre of the Innocents,” 1824.







Haarlem, Cornelis “Massacre of the Innocents,” 1591.








Tintoretto, “Massacre of the Innocents,” 1587.








Bruegel the Elder, “Massacre of the Innocents,” 1565-7.








“The Massacre of the Innocents” by Brueghel the Younger, 1638.


Sources: The introduction is taken from the Catholic Encyclopedia article Holy Innocents, the bulk of the artwork is taken from the Massacre of the Innocents wikipedia article, and the rest of the pieces are from various other sources. [↩]
Tags: Christmas, Herod, Holy Innocents, Jesus Christ, Massacre of the Innocents