A new investigative video shows a Washington, D.C.-based abortion doctor admitting that if a baby is born alive in his clinic after a failed abortion attempt he would let the baby choke to death on fluid in the child's lungs.

A pro-life activist who is 24 weeks pregnant asks Dr. Cesare Santangelo of the Washington Surgi-Clinic, which is located just five blocks west of the White House, what would happen if the baby she wants to abort were accidentally born alive.

"Technically – you know, legally we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive.  But, you know, it probably wouldn’t.  It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point," Santangelo says in the video. "Let’s say you went into labor, the membranes ruptured, and you delivered before we got to the termination part of the procedure here, you know?  Then we would do things – we would – we would not help it.  We wouldn’t intubate.  It would be, you know, uh, a person, a terminal person in the hospital, let’s say, that had cancer, you know?  You wouldn’t do any extra procedures to help that person survive.  Like ‘do not resuscitate’ orders.  We would do the same things here.”

Intubation is routine medical care for a human being who cannot breathe, but Santangelo reaffirms in a follow-up interview with the Washington Post that he considers such care "extraordinary" for a baby born alive after an attempted abortion.
"What I said is, basically I wouldn’t do anything extraordinary," Santangelo tells the Post. "We would call EMS. We would call 9-1-1. But I wouldn’t do intubation or anything. . . . You let nature take its course."

The long-term survival rate (aka "viability") of an infant born prematurely is largely a factor of the child's lung development. As Dr. Colleen A. Malloy, assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, testified before Congress in 2012, 
"Medical advancement and technology have enabled us to improve our ability to care for these infants. In June 2009, the Journal of American Medical Association reported a Swedish series of over 300,000 infants. Survival to 1 year of life of live born infants at 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24 weeks post-fertilization age was 10%, 53%, 67%, 82%, and 85%, respectively. In September 2010, Pediatrics reported survival to discharge rates of 9575 infants at a number of academic institutions in the US. The results were similar, with survival at 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24 weeks post-fertilization age being 6%, 26%, 55%, 72%, and 84%, respectively."

The Washington Surgi-Clinic, located just five blocks west of the White House, advertises on its website that it will perform abortions during the sixth month of pregnancy.

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located just five blocks west of the White House