Republican North Carolina Rep. Pat McElcraft testified to the horrors of abortion during a hearing about Bill 359, which North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) ultimately vetoed.

Bill 359, had Cooper signed it, would have required that babies surviving botched abortion attempts would receive the same consideration when it came to lifesaving care "as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age." If violated, the bill would penalize doctors and health care providers.

Cooper said that he vetoed the bill because "[l]aws already protect newborn babies and this bill is an unnecessary interference between doctors and their patients. This needless legislation would criminalize doctors and other healthcare providers for a practice that simply does not exist."

So what did McElcraft say about abortion?

During the hearing, McElcraft pointed to her years working in the medical field, in which she witnessed the aftermath of many abortions.

According to Live Action, McElcraft said that the bill was necessary to protect the lives of unborn — and newborn — babies.

"There was an abortionist in Jacksonville, North Carolina, who was known nationally for performing late term abortions. We heard of many girls who came from other states to North Carolina — Jacksonville, North Carolina, to have their late-term abortions. Even hitchhiking down from New York, some of them did, to come in," she said.



McElcraft went on to point out that saline abortions were performed at the time, administered through an injection into the uterus. The extra-concentrated saline solution would kill the unborn baby over a course of several hours, and then the child's mother would go on to birth a dead child.

She pointed out that the abortions of today aren't any better, noting that many late-term abortions are completed through a D&E — in which the baby is actively dismembered in the womb — or via induction, in which the child is directly injected with a poison causing heart failure.

"Nurses told stories of the babies that were born alive and [had] been taken by the doctor and turned over with their faces down in the saline to drown," she said. "Most of the nurses refused to work with this abortionist. He only did his abortions on the weekends."



"One day I was on a break, [and] went in to visit with the pathologist in the pathology lab, and I asked him, I said, 'What are all these little pigs doing in these buckets?'" McElcraft explained. "He told me, 'Pat, look again.' And I did. They were perfectly formed little human babies in those buckets. Their skin was even pinker than a normal baby would be, because it had been burned by the saline. Those were the weekend's abortions."