Infanticide update: Abortion provider arrested

posted at 11:20 am on March 4, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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Last month, I posted about a case of infanticide from a botched abortion in Miami, which resulted in a civil suit filed by the mother against the clinic and the suspension of their license.  Yesterday, Miami police arrested the woman who literally threw away a live infant — but not for murder.   At least at the moment, Belkis Gonzalez only faces charges of practicing medicine without a license and tampering with evidence:

An abortion clinic owner is accused of delivering a live baby during a botched procedure and then throwing the infant away.

Belkis Gonzalez, 42, was arrested Tuesday and charged with practicing medicine without a license and tampering with evidence, both felonies, said Ed Griffith, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office. If found guilty, Gonzalez would face at least a year in prison and up to 15 years.

The teenage mother, Sycloria Williams, has filed a lawsuit alleging that Gonzalez knocked the infant off the chair where she had given birth, and then scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag, and threw it out.

The clinic’s doctor, Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique, had been scheduled to perform the procedure, but Williams went into labor after being given drugs to dilate her cervix and waiting for hours for Renelique to arrive, the suit said. The doctor has said he had been on his way to the Hialeah clinic when he was called to treat another patient who was bleeding.

Of course, murder charges could come later, but it seems rather disturbing that these are the only charges filed at the moment.  Gonzalez is being held on $50,000 bail pending a hearing this morning, and in the absence of stronger charges will probably win a bail reduction.  The charges seem to indicate that Miami only considers the live infant valuable only as evidence of Gonzalez’ performance of medical procedures without certification, rather than a live human being killed through her direct actions.

In any event, if this doesn’t show that infanticide really does occur, it’s hard to say what will convince people like then-state Senator Barack Obama.  When denying infants like Williams protection, Obama declared to the Illinois legislature that this never happens, despite hearing testimony that it happened regularly in his state:

[T]he only plausible rationale, to my mind, for this legislation would be if you had a suspicion that a doctor, the attending physician, who has made the assessment that this is a nonviable fetus and that, let’s say for the purposes of the mother’s health, is being — that — that labor is being induced, that that physician (a) is going to make the wrong assessment and (b) if the physician discovered, after the labor had been induced, that, in fact, he made an error, and in fact this was not a nonviable fetus but, in fact, a live child, that the physician, of his own accord or her own accord, would not try to exercise the sort of medical procedures and practices that would be involved in saving that child.

Now, if — if you think that there are possibilities that doctors would not do that, then maybe this bill makes sense, but I — I suspect and my impression is, is that the Medical Society suspects that doctors feel that they would already be under that obligation[.]

No, abortionists do not feel that obligation, as people like Jill Stanek testified from direct, personal experience.   In fact, they feel an obligation to make sure an infant dies in this procedure, whether inside or outside of the womb.  Their industry depends on it.  (via Jonah Goldberg at The Corner)

Update: Jill has further thoughts.

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