Midwife tells inquiry about babies being left to die alone “gasping for air” after surviving late-term abortions

On Monday, an Australian midwife tearfully told a Queensland parliamentary inquiry that in the hospital where she works babies are born alive struggling to breathe after late-term abortions but are given no medical assistance and are left to die alone unaided.

Louise Adsett’s testimony was like a mirror image of the research from University College Cork in 2020 that revealed under Ireland’s new abortion law babies have been born alive after late-term abortions and been left to die alone unaided in hospital corners.

Ms Adsett, who has worked as a clinical midwife in Brisbane for the past 14 years, was giving evidence to a state parliamentary inquiry into the Termination of Pregnancy (Live Births) Amendment Bill 2024.

In her heart-wrenching account, she said: “Sadly in the birth suite unit in my hospital where every new birth is celebrated and protected, there has been an increase in numbers of social terminations at later gestations and this is now common. We’ve had babies born alive after terminations from 15 to 22 weeks, born alive, gasping for air, moving and having a palpable heart rate – fighting for their lives as we as humans are designed to do.”  

She added that “sometimes babies born alive after an abortion are put into witches hats and are covered, taken out of the room and die while in that witches hat.” She described this dark and weird practice as “distressing to many of the midwives as they are unable to provide any medical care for the baby but are limited to providing comfort care only, which is merely wrapping and holding the baby.”

The mother-of-three described herself as a “conscientious objector” to abortion and said she made every effort to provide comfort to the dying babies when she was on duty. She talked about one baby who lived for five hours after the abortion.

Senior members of government and the media in Ireland are fully aware that these acts of barbarism are occurring under the new law here but they choose to do nothing about it. This is the true face of the abortion movement, not the sanitised version thrust on the public day after day on the national airwaves. If the media won’t do their job, we need to do it for them as best we can by sharing the truth of what’s happening with our family, close friends and, if we have a means of doing so, with the wider public. Silence in the face of such cruelty and inhumanity is complicity.