Tuesday, Jan. 22 was the 29th anniversary of abortion in America. It was also my sister's birthday, which makes me wonder: What if she had been among the 40 million babies killed since the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973?

        She wouldn't have been there to yank my handlebars as I was speeding down a hill on my bike, and I would not have pieces of gravel still stuck in my scalp.

        Big Sis Cindy would not have been around to tie me up in a rope — OK, I was asking for it — and laugh hysterically as I fell on the fireplace and had to get several stitches.

        I would not have received a cheerful birthday card from her this year, reminding me that in dog years, I would already be dead. Thanks!

        But I'm just joking, because otherwise abortion will make you want to cry if you have a heart at all.

        Here's some testimony from Congress about babies who accidentally survive abortions:

        “In the event that a baby is aborted alive, he or she is given what my hospital calls "comfort care,”' said Jill Stanek, R.N., who worked in Labor & Delivery at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. “"Comfort care' involves wrapping the baby in a blanket and offering her to her parents to hold until she dies. If parents do not want to hold their baby, as I have been told is most often the case, it is left to staff to care for the baby.

        “Up until recently, staff options were to hold the baby until death, or put the baby in our Soiled Utility Room if we got too busy or if the baby lingered too long. Indeed, it is not uncommon for one of these babies to live for an hour or two or even longer.”

        Ms. Stanek told a House committee that her hospital performed “induced labor abortion” in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, that “sometimes results in infants being aborted alive.”

        Abortion doctors call that a “complication.”

        In Cincinnati a few years ago, a medical technician was asked to dispose of a struggling aborted baby girl and replied, “I don't think I can do that. This baby is alive.” She rocked and held “Baby Hope” for three hours because, “I wanted her to feel wanted” before she died.

        All this is in the Congressional record, from hearings on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. The concept behind the law is simple: Any child that survives an abortion is entitled to the constitutional rights of “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness,” and has to be saved, not killed.

        Ms. Stanek was fired by Christ Hospital for telling Congress about babies left alone to die, even accidentally thrown into the garbage. “I felt compelled to defend my faith at a hospital named after Jesus Christ,” she said. “What's happening now is that a Pandora's Box has been opened. Now it has been extended beyond a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, to the right to a dead baby.”

        She said a co-worker told her, “I can't stop thinking about it.”

        Some politicians, though, would love to stop thinking about it.

        Versions of the Infants Protection Act passed the House 380-15 and sailed through the Senate 98-0 in 2000. But then it stalled.

        Now Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Cincinnati, is trying again. “All of American children are precious and should be protected,” he said. “It's almost incomprehensible that someone could treat these innocent human babies as trash.”

        “I think it's very difficult to argue against it,” he said.

        He's right. So Democrats who defend the “choice” to let babies die in trash bags have a clever strategy: They support the bill in public — then work behind the scenes to kill it.

        Mr. Chabot, who also has a birthday on Jan. 22, said he will keep “trying to protect as many babies as we can.”

        For every three brothers or sisters born in the past 29 years, somewhere, one baby has been killed to avoid “complications.”

        It makes me wonder: What about their birthdays?

        E-mail: pbronson@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/bronson

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