Jane was in a crisis pregnancy and decided that she had no choice but to end the life of her unborn child. She took abortion pills at a public hospital but instantly regretted it. She told the doctor that she wanted the baby but, instead of reversing the process, the doctor induced labor and then murdered little Milagros, who was born at 6 months.
This is her story.
Jane[1] was 21 years old and had a 2-year-old daughter when she became pregnant a second time. She was living with her uncle Cristian González and his wife Silvina, who had taken her in as a child when her mother had abandoned her.
On August 23th of this year, she went to a public hospital in the city of Tartagal, Argentina, intending to have an abortion. Doctor Miranda Lucía Ruiz ordered a routine sonogram and determined that she was over 22 weeks pregnant and that the baby had "a normal heartbeat" and showed "normal fetal activity".
The following day Dr. Vidal, another doctor at the hospital who was opposed to abortion, told her that at her stage of pregnancy, the risk of an abortion to the mother was much higher than the risk of a full-term delivery[2]. He refused to have anything to do with an abortion and referred her back to Dr. Ruiz. But he also phoned Jane's uncle and urged him to deter his niece from going through with it.
The uncle immediately called the hospital and was able to get Jane on the phone. He told her that they would raise her baby. Or, if she was determined to not to keep the child, she could give her up for adoption.
Jane agreed but then dropped a bombshell. She said the doctor had already made her take some pills and ordered her to stay at the hospital because of the risk of hemorrhages.
Unbeknownst to everyone, Dr. Ruiz had already administered the first round of abortion pills to Jane.
Her uncle had also contacted a pro-life town councilor named Claudia Subelza, who served as the head of the local Childhood, Adolescence and Family office, which is similar to Child Protective Services in the U.S. Once Jane assured Claudia that she wanted to keep the baby and would refuse any more abortion pills, Claudia went to work. She began spreading the news of Jane's situation on social media in order to put pressure on the hospital to cease and desist from any further action that might harm Jane's baby.
At this point there was still time to administer medications that would reverse the effect of the abortion pills and save Jane's baby. But that's not what happened.
Within hours, Jane was calling Claudia in despair. "They are taking me to the operating room to perform an abortion," she sobbed.
Claudia called the hospital director, a Dr. Santiago Payo and asked him to delay the procedure, point out that Argentinian law does not allow an abortion at six months. In fact, there are no circumstances where an abortion is ever allowed in that country after 14 weeks.
Dr. Pago rejected her request, saying that their actions were "protected by the law". He even falsely claimed the 14-week-limit was no longer valid. He said that Jane as an adult, she had come to them requesting an abortion, and that the abortion would be done.
Not long after, Jane was on the phone with her uncle, telling him that the doctors had already aborted her. She had been quickly given an epidural which paralyzed her from the wait down and this a c-section. She was awake during the abortion, she told Claudia, and was able to see her baby girl, Milagros, being born and "handled"[3].
"Please let me hold my baby," she had begged Dr. Miranda Ruiz. But Ruiz refused and quickly took Milagros away. From a distance, she heard her baby girl cry once and then, silent. She never heard Milagros again.[4]
The Argentinian government has refused to take action against the doctor, who has not been charged with a crime. She remains free to carry on her grisly trade.
Claudia, the head of the local Childhood, Adolescence and Family office, says that what happened to Jane's baby was not an abortion, but infanticide. It was not a murder in the womb but outside the womb.
The nurses who were in attendance corroborate that the baby was whimpering when it was born. But little Milagros was put inside a trash bag and thrown away like so much trash.
Jane had taken only 4 of the 16 abortion pills, so it would have been possible to reverse the process at the early stage. Dr. Ruiz told Jane that she could not release her from the hospital because her life was at risk. She was giving Jane misoprostol to be dissolved under the tongue every 3 hours, in order to induce labour.[5]
When Jane began protesting they quickly took her to the operating room against her will to complete the abortion.[6]
Dr. Ruiz insisted on going through with the c-section even though Jane was on record as saying she didn't want an abortion even before entering the operating room. This is documented in the hospital's nursing book and in her clinical record.
Jane understands that, by continuing the unwanted abortion, the doctor "put her life at risk", not to mention taking Miagros life. So she decided to take legal action.
On September 5th, Jane presented a criminal complaint to the district attorney to initiate prosecution against Dr. Miranda Ruiz, " because she killed my baby ."
That say day, Dr. Ruiz was detained by order of Judge Fernando Mariscal Astigueta, but was released after 7 hours when the district attorney, Gonzalo Vega, claimed that Jane had never objected to the abortion.
The abortionist in question, Dr. Ruiz, says that everything is based on lies. She claims that the baby was already dead when she delivered it by c-section. Yet Jane and the nurses who were present say that the baby was whimpering and crying. There is even a birth certificate signed by two members of the hospital staff and Jane documenting MIlagos' birth, and giving the date and time of "the newborn" as August 24, 2021, at 19:30.
The nurses on duty even gave the baby an APGAR test which showed that the baby was born alive. Milagros scored a 3 or 4 out of 10. Had she been born dead, as Dr. Ruiz claims, she would have scored 0.
From the time that Jane stated she did not want to abort Milagors, until the c-section was performed and Milagors was killed, nearly seven hours had elapsed. There was plenty of time for a complete reversal.
Since Jane had only just taken 4 of the 16 pill regimen (apparently, 200 mcg each misoprostol pill[7]), Jane could have been induced to vomit or she could have had a gastric lavage to get the misoprostol out of her system.[8] Or she could even have been given food and antiacides, since "food and antacids decrease the rate of absorption of misoprostol, resulting in delayed and decreased peak plasma concentrations."[9]
Alternatively, she could have been given progesterone and drugs to block misoprostol (binding to prostaglandin EP2, EP3 and EP4 receptors in myometrial cells), to reduce the effectiveness[10] of misoprostol, or to avoid/reduce the uterine contractions caused by misoprostol. In other words, the baby could still have still been saved.
Instead, Dr. Ruiz was bent on her killing mission, She didn't even try to reverse the abortion. Instead, she tried to hasten the process, pharmaceutically inducing Jane into labor with more misoprostol.[11] And when that didn't work quickly enough to suit her, she delivered the baby by c-section and suffocated it in a trash bag.
On September 4th, pro-lifers protested in front of the Children's hospital in Salta where this tragedy happened. They are holding pale blue scarves, which is the color that Latin American pro-lifers have adopted to represent the cause of life.
Jane requested that Milagros be turned over to a pathologist for an autopsy, hoping that the results would show that she had been born alive. The hospital took 13 days to comply with the order, and finally turned over a trash bag filled with bones. All of the flesh was gone, as if the bones had been washed in acid. Of course, the hospital administrators are well aware that, without the organs there is no way forensically to check if Milagros was born alive, or even if these are in fact Milagros' bones.
It appears to Jane and her supporters that this is further evidence that the hospital authorities are aware of what they have done. After all, the first thing the guilty do is to get rid of the evidence.
On September 9th, the minister of health of the province of Salta, Doctor Juan José Esteban, held a press conference at which he denied that Dr. Ruiz, who is one of his employees, had committed infanticide.[12]
But the evidence clearly shows otherwise. Milagros was delivered alive and murdered outside the womb. Jane, for her part, was forced to watch while her child was taken away to be put to death.
It is a story that is repeated, mutatis mutandis, in country after country as the global abortion movement continues its war on the unborn.[13]