Neonatal intensive care unit nurses have one of the most difficult jobs imaginable, one that involves caring for dying newborns and simultaneously supporting their grieving parents through the worst day of their lives. Now, that job is being made harder—and dangerous—by Republican lies that parents and doctors are “executing” babies.
“The families that I've worked with, where I've handed them their babies for the first and last time, they don't deserve this kind of thing,” nurse Anna Schmidt told The Daily Beast. “They don’t deserve to be vilified or to be called an executioner.” Another NICU nurse called the execution lie “just utterly bizarre and dangerous and insulting.”
That nurse, Julia Pulver, tweeted that these decisions involve “Parents of babies who had fought so hard for their tiny little lives and weren’t going to make it…And parents of babies who, after they were born, and wouldn’t have their moms body keeping them alive, would die rather quickly,” writing that in her experience on her hospital’s bereavement team, “We placed the babies skin to skin with mom and placed a blanket over them both. We lowered the lights and quieted the room. We had as much or as little family and the parents wanted in the room. We sang songs, we prayed, we hugged, we swayed...and we all cried.” It is “the equivalent of neonatal hospice to families who are living through absolute Hell.”
And, Pulver tweeted, “NO ONE ever, in any hospital, nor any mother who has just given birth, is conspiring with a doctor on whether or not to commit infanticide. This is perhaps one of the sickest accusations levied by this deranged dictator yet.”
It’s a dangerous accusation, too. A Trump supporter arrested just last week for threatening to rape and murder an abortion supporter wrote things like “I will kill every Democrat in the world so we never more have to have our babies brutally murdered by you absolute terrorists” and “you who would brutally murder a child after they were born (or before they were born). You are evil.”
No woman carries a pregnancy to term, goes to a hospital, delivers a baby, and then calls for its execution. No healthcare professional would carry out that wish. Donald Trump is smearing and endangering grieving families and the nurses and doctors who make their dying babies comfortable and help them through that horrific experience.