Pro-life lobby groups and NGOs are calling on European legislators to “denounce and end” the practices of late abortion and ‘neonatal infanticide’ in Europe where a baby is left to die after a failed abortion.
Ahead of the forthcoming session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) – this June 22-26 – the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), together with a grouping of NGOs, submitted the ‘Petition for the rights of new-borns surviving their abortion’.
The document, supported by over 200,000 European citizens, calls on the Assembly to “investigate and report on the situation of children born alive during their abortion” and “to reaffirm that all human beings born alive have the same right to life and must benefit from appropriate and necessary health care, according to human rights”.
According to the ECLJ, while prematurely born children receive every care towards their survival, or comforting care towards their inevitable death, “the situation is different for those children who are born alive after an abortion. Every year in Europe, children are born alive at the time of the abortion procedure after the 20th week of pregnancy. They are often abandoned to die without care, struggling to breathe, sometimes for several hours; or they are killed by lethal injection or suffocation, and often thrown away with medical waste.”
Towards raising awareness on the issue of late abortions, and the drastic and painful methods used in such terminations, the ECLJ submitted its own report to PACE which contains official data and personal testimonies of medical practitioners who witnessed the practices. Additionally, the group points out that “according to the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, at 23 weeks of pregnancy, 10% of children survive abortion”.
“By leaving babies to die without treatment, or actively killing them, simply because they are not wanted is inhumane and contrary to fundamental rights. According to European law, all human beings born alive have the same right to life, to physical integrity and to receive necessary treatment and care, irrespective of the circumstances of their birth.”
The petition, the ECLJ adds, “requests the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to denounce and put an end to these practices, so that all newborns are treated as human beings”.