Barack Obama and The Comfort Room

By Jill Stanek


In March 2002, then IL state Sen. Barack Obama and I engaged in an interesting exchange during my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he was a member. I was speaking in favor of the IL Born Alive Infant Protection Act for the second time, which had failed the year before. The previous year, I had told Obama and the committee of my experience holding a live aborted baby until he died in my capacity as a labor and delivery nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, IL. That year, I described Christ Hospital's Comfort Room, unveiled in December 2000 to counter my public statements that personnel were shelving babies to die in the department's soiled utility room next to dirty linens, bloody and biohazardous waste, and a urinal.... I did not mention the Comfort Room when I testified again in 2002. But Barack Obama remembered....

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