Holding on for Dear Lives
By Jonathan Imbody
Winter 2002 Family Voice

Barreling down Highway 41 in Schneider, Indiana, the driver of the semitrailer did not see the stalled car just ahead, hidden by the crest of a hill. Family members inside the car did not know, either, or they never would have left their baby vulnerable without a car seat.

“I was the first person to arrive on the scene of that horrible accident,” remembers Jill Stanek, at the time a young mother just past her teens. “The dad and grandpa had been sitting in the front seat and the mom and grandma in the back, holding their baby girl. So when the truck hit the car from behind,” Jill explains, “the baby was thrown from the back seat into the windshield.”

When Jill came upon the accident, she found the baby’s father in shock, sitting on the ground next to the car. He was holding his dying baby. “I didn’t know what to do,” Jill recalls. “I remember feeling very helpless as I watched. … I never wanted to feel that way again.”

Armed with that determination, Jill enrolled in nursing school, graduated in 1993, and took a position at Christ Hospital near Chicago. She loved her work as an obstetrics nurse, which gave her the chance to help save babies’ lives instead of helplessly watching them die. Until one day at the hospital …

Behind Closed Doors
This time it wasn’t an accident that left a tiny baby desperately gasping for life. A baby boy had been deliberately delivered prematurely in a quietly practiced procedure called “live-birth abortion.” Practitioners euphemistically refer to it as “induced-labor abortion.”

After learning their developing baby had Down syndrome, a nonfatal genetic disorder, the parents had decided he should die. Their physician had enforced the verdict with a drug that forcibly dilated the mother’s cervix, causing the baby to literally drop through the birth canal. Without adequately developed lungs and heart, the pre-term baby could not survive outside the womb.

“A nursing co-worker was taking this aborted baby, who was born alive, to our Soiled Utility Room,” Jill relates, “because his parents didn’t want to hold him.” Nor did the nurse have time to hold him. But Jill couldn’t bear to leave the child to die alone.

“So I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived,” she recalls. He was too weak to move very much, as he struggled just to breathe. The tiny boy was about 21 weeks old and weighed about 1/2 pound.

The very profession Jill had entered to help avert tragedy had now become the purveyor of tragedy.

“The feelings of helplessness I had once had … returned,” Jill laments. “This baby was so quiet toward the end of his life that I couldn’t tell if he was still alive. I had to hold him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his thin chest wall.

“After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest and wrapped him in a tiny shroud. Then we carried him to the hospital morgue, where all of our dead patients are taken,” Jill says, with pointed irony.

Heartbreak and Injustice
The heartbreak and sense of injustice prompted Jill to write a letter to hospital administrators, chronicling the deaths of infants born alive. But they had no intention of stopping the practice.

Jill’s letter prompted Concerned Women for America (CWA) Illinois State Director Karen Hayes to invite Jill to meet with CWA members and state Sen. Patrick O’Malley (R-18th District).

“We knew this issue went beyond abortion,” Karen explains. “It raised new questions, constitutional issues. I took Jill’s letter and relevant statutes to the Attorney General’s office. He never really addressed the constitutional or legal issues, though—just the bureaucratic regulations.”

CWA of Illinois plugged Jill into contacts to help get the word out. The state organization got Sen. O’Malley involved, put together prayer vigils and pastors’ meetings, and helped with legislation. Karen accompanied Jill to Washington, D.C., when Jill testified before Congress, and held CWA lobby days at the state Capitol in Springfield. Jill also spoke at the CWA national convention and told her story on radio on Beverly LaHaye Today.

Meanwhile, CWA staff in Washington, D.C., worked with former Rep. Charles Canady (R-Florida) to introduce federal legislation, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. To highlight the issue in Washington, Jill testified at a Congressional Life Forum. CWA staff arranged for her to visit congressional leaders and to be interviewed by representatives from major media.

“Since the issue first arose, it has been high on our legislative agenda,” says CWA Vice President for Government Relations Michael Schwartz. “Karen Hayes saw the significance … and got us involved. CWA is blessed, fortunate and proud to be able to support Jill’s and Karen’s good work. Without them, this legislation would not have happened.”

On Capitol Hill
Within a year of first speaking out, Jill Stanek found herself seated in an imposing chamber in the U.S. House of Representatives awaiting a grilling about babies who die without mercy. She saw microphones everywhere and important people she had seen before only on TV. She had practiced her three-minute statement until she could say it in her sleep, but that wouldn’t help during the live questioning that would follow.

The hearing room hushed as Jill recounted her experience and others of babies born alive and left to die.

“I was told about an aborted baby who was supposed to have spina bifida but was delivered with an intact spine. Another nurse is haunted by the memory of an aborted baby who came out weighing much more than expected—almost two pounds. She is haunted because she doesn't know if she made a mistake by not getting that baby medical help.

“A support associate told me about a live aborted baby who was left to die on the counter of the Soiled Utility Room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown into the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the baby, the baby fell … onto the floor.”

Then Jill shifted from witness to prophet.

“Something is very wrong with a legal system that says doctors are mandated to pronounce babies dead but are not mandated to assess babies for life and chances of survival. … We look the other way and pretend that these babies aren’t human while they’re alive but human only after they are dead.”

Outside the hearing room, Jill faced a phalanx of cameras and reporters. During the months that had passed since she had publicly revealed the practice, Jill had grown used to the spotlight. Yet little in her unassuming background would have portended the role to which God had now called her.

Childhood Near the Lake
Born in Cedar Lake, Indiana, in 1956, Jill remembers “a rather idyllic childhood—swimming, fishing, playing cowboys and Indians, and becoming proficient on pinball in the resort pavilion.” Her preacher father soon quit the ministry and his faith faltered. Her mother, however, remained faithful to the Lord and, by the age of 11, Jill was baptized upon her confession of faith.

“God was very important to me until my senior high school year,” Jill remembers. “But then I fell in with the wrong crowd and began 12 years of living apart from God and suffering the consequences.”

Pregnant at the age of 19, Jill married and gave birth to a boy, Michael. Within three years, the young couple divorced. Later, while working as a secretary at an engineering firm in Chicago, she met her husband, Rich.

“He had a good head on his shoulders and was a very stabilizing influence,” Jill explains. “We established a nice home, had two more children, and Rich adopted Michael.”

Still, “something was missing,” Jill says. So in 1986 at the age of 30, she returned to the faith of her childhood.

“I found Jesus again,” she explains simply, and Rich eventually followed.

Fierce Devotion
Jill’s newly launched relationship with a righteous and gracious God would ultimately provide her relentless courage to save babies from a lonely death.

“I may be very scared on the inside,” she confesses, “but with the help of God I still practice courage on the outside.

“I have made a royal mess of my life a few times over,” Jill laments. “But He has always ‘pulled me out of the raging waters,’ as the psalmist says. … Because of my penchant for sin, and because of the great love God has demonstrated that He has for me, I cling very closely to him.”

God’s abundant grace in Jill’s life has secured her fierce devotion.

“If I had discovered abortion at any other hospital with any name besides the name of Jesus, I really don’t think I would have stayed so long or fought so hard,” she says. “But it cuts in my deepest heart to know that abortion is being committed at a hospital named after my Lord and Savior.”

The willingness to defend God’s name no matter what others thought proved crucial in Jill’s motivation to speak out. None of her nurse colleagues ever joined her.

“I felt like the only sane person in an insane asylum,” Jill reflects. “I wondered how no one else could see this the way I saw it.”

After two years of attempting to defend their inhumane practice, hospital administrators decided they’d had enough. When Jill returned to work after a two-week vacation last August, they greeted her with a pink termination slip. A guard escorted her out of the building.

For Jill, who had stayed only because she had not yet sensed freedom from the Lord to quit, the firing was a relief.

How You Can Help

Pray for the smooth passage of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act.  Praise for how God has used His servant, Jill Stanek.  Act Write a letter to the editor that educates about live-birth abortion.

“I was worn out,” she explains. “I could never get past the thought that if I quit, I would be quitting on God Himself. … I thought that I would be leaving babies to die, … so I was honestly very relieved. … I had allowed Him to determine the course of events.”

That course of events does not appear to have ended. Jill has decided to run for the Illinois General Assembly against a state representative who aggressively helped block Illinois legislation to protect born-alive infants. That legislator also serves on the Governing Council of Christ Hospital.

Protecting the Babies
Meanwhile, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2001 passed both houses of Congress by overwhelming margins. During the first session of the 107th Congress, it was inserted into the Patients’ Bill of Rights, which now awaits negotiations unrelated to the amendment. Because Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) could possibly scuttle the bill, it might be necessary to attach it to some other piece of must-pass legislation.

The bottom line, says Michael Schwartz: “We are no more than a year away from seeing it signed into law.”

“I give Jill so much credit,” observes Wendy Wright, CWA’s director of communications. “Even when she found out there were no laws prohibiting the practice, she worked to get laws on the books. … If it weren’t for that one woman, we wouldn’t have this legislation today. God has put His mantle on Jill for this purpose.”

More from Winter 2002 Family Voice