[Edit]: A summary that exposes deeper ramifications:
New Scientist, a popular site with over 3 million unique visitors a month, initially responded to the nation's first abortion ban based on fetal pain in April 2010 with a simple "briefing" that wasn't widely repeated throughout the web. The article focused on discrediting Nebraska's 20-week abortion "Fetal Pain" restriction as "debatable."
Late last week, New Scientist followed up (HT Tabitha Hale's Amplify) with a direct refutation of the "pain claim" by citing a UK study that had been picked up by UPI and the AP for mass distribution.
This study has subsequently appeared in Time, CBS, The Money Times, MSNBC, and The Washington Post.
The headliner for these articles on the UK study generally state, " Fetus Can't Feel Pain Before 24 Weeks." What these articles aren't telling the public is that this study advocates absolutely no regard for the pain (and therefore treatment of pain) of the unborn before or after 24 weeks - throughout the duration of the pregnancy, in fact - even for corrective procedures performed on fetuses in utero, something that is typically done here in the United States.
In the United States, we have our own studies concluding the opposite of the UK study. Methods of administering fetal anesthesia are widely discussed. This is the neonatal care standard we've practiced here in the United States as our technology advances. Neonatal care is a profession.
The widespread dissemination by the leftist mainstream media of this worthless UK study that can readily by discredited by medical studies and medical methodology accepted and practiced here in the US flies in the face of reason -- so much so, one can easily assume why abortionists would be interested in dismissing the pain of the littlest ones.
Back in April, Nebraska passed the first-ever "Fetal "Pain" abortion bill -- the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” (LB 1103 ) -- to prevent the abortions of fetuses older than 20 weeks...
...by an overwhelming pro-life majority of 44 in favor and 5 against. The governor wasted no time in signing the measure into law.The law portends a fresh challenge and new look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton cases, which led to the virtual legalization of abortion on demand. The Nebraska law applies a different standard – that of the unborn child’s ability to feel pain - for restricting abortion, while the high court used the standard of what they then considered to be point of fetal viability.
The Supreme Court considered fetuses "viable" beginning at 24 weeks when deciding Roe v. Wade, a mistake subsequent Justices would argue :
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued in a 1983 decision that Roe was on a "collision course with itself." She said that improvements in technology would continually push the point of fetal viability closer to the beginning of the pregnancy, allowing states greater opportunity to regulate the right to an abortion.
Nebraska's LB 1103 would be is the first state to regulate abortion according to the interests of the baby, not according to the interests of the mother:
"The Nebraska Legislature took a bold step today which should ratchet up the abortion debate across America," said Julie Schmit-Albin, Executive Director of Nebraska Right to Life in a statement.
"LB 1103 creates a case of first impression for the courts to acknowledge the capability to feel pain as a compelling state interest to protect those unborn babies from an excruciatingly painful death.”
The legislation bans abortions after 20 weeks of post-fertilization age except in two cases: first, when the pregnancy puts the mother in danger of death or “substantial and irreversible” physical harm to a major bodily function. The second exception allows an abortionist to perform an abortion in order to increase the probability of a live birth, or to preserve an unborn child’s life and health after a live birth.
This is important, because this law shifts the argument from the focus of time restrictions for would-be aborting mothers to the focus of the effects of the abortion itself on the fetus -- from the interests of the mother to the interests of the child. It forces society and the courts to admit the human-ness of the fetus and consider their suffering in a very real death.
To pass LB 1103, Nebraska cited the 2004 testimony of Kanwaljeet Anand from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center who testified on the federal partial birth abortion ban (subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007):
Kanwaljeet “Sunny” Anand, a pioneer in the study of fetal pain and now a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, testified in 2004 on the federal partial birth abortion ban that after 20 weeks gestation, an unborn child would experience “severe and excruciating pain” from an abortion.
The pain may even be more acute than it would be for older humans, as some research indicates their immature nervous systems have not developed coping mechanisms that help the body better endure pain.
The law notes that unborn children have been observed to “seek to evade certain stimuli” in a manner that “would be interpreted as a response to pain.” Additionally, the bill says unborn children exhibit “hormonal stress responses to painful stimuli” that were reduced with the application of pain medication.
Abortion supporters want to call that evasion of "certain stimuli" a reflex action, similar to a knee-jerk responding to a tap on the knee or a finger removing itself from a heat source before being sensed by the brain.
When Nebraska passed LB 1103 in April of this year, New Scientist.com came out with a 2-page rebuttal to the law's fetal-pain argument. The site claimed that changing the terms of abortion is inappropriate because pain experienced by fetuses as young as 20 weeks is "far from certain." The site's most vile assertion is the lie that "before most abortions the fetal heart is stopped by a drug – usually digoxin or potassium chloride . The fetus cannot feel pain after that."
Using digoxin or potassium chloride on fetuses did not begin to be seriously considered by abortionists until after the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial birth abortion ban in 2007, and only then for the abortion of fetuses older than 20 weeks. Even so, an "interest" by those who slaughter the unborn does not constitute a widespread, enforceable mandate.
Potassium chloride is also the same chemical used for the lethal injection of prisoners, a practice New Scientist claims is inhumane .
So while New Scientist will consider the inhumane manner of death of a condemned person, this same publication will blatantly dismiss the pain of the unborn as merely "reflexive," "irrelevant," and even "completely irrational."
Last week, New Scientist reiterated their support for abortion by using a study by the UKs Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) to refute the opinion of American researchers. Keep in mind that the UK has full-blown socialized medicine , where abortion on demand has been rising for years and where medical procedures are pre-determined by committee according to "harms and benefits" -- or cost-effectiveness.
New Scientist cited a "working party report " that argues that since the pre-born fetuses exist in a state of unconsciousness, that consciousness is needed to experience pain. Therefore, pre-born fetuses, regardless of gestational age, "even after 24 weeks" would not benefit from pain medication.
"After 24 weeks there is continuing development and elaboration of intracortical networks" .. "Such connections to the cortex are necessary for pain experience but not sufficient , as experience of external stimuli requires consciousness . ..[T]he fetus never experiences a state of true wakefulness in utero ... [ i]s in a continuous sleep-like unconsciousness ... [that] suppress[es] higher cortical activation in the presence of intrusive external stimuli. ..
[I]n the light of current evidence, the Working Party concluded that the use of analgesia provided no clear benefit to the fetus. ... [F]etal analgesia should not be employed where the only consideration is concern about fetal awareness or pain . Similarly, there appeared to be no clear benefit in considering the need for fetal analgesia prior to termination of pregnancy, even after 24 weeks , in cases of fetal abnormality.
New Scientist ends their article with
"It is only after birth, with the separation of the baby from the uterus and the umbilical cord, that wakefulness truly begins."
According to the RCOG, only once that umbilical cord is cut can a child experience pain, never before.
By citing this wretched study, the argument of New Scientist and all pro-abortion advocates is clear: pain experienced by fetuses in utero is hardly significant, and whatever ground the pro-life camp makes, the tide must be turned around, 360 degrees. Therefore, define fetuses as sub-human, never requiring pain medication, regardless of gestational age.
If the Supreme Court were to agree with the RCOG study, the issue of viability in Roe v. Wade would be moot. The experience of pain would be the true threshold, and that would only occur once the umbilical is cut when everyone can hear the newborn cry.
Abortionists like these subscribe to ideas similar to this one:
When a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound.
Since these abortionists aren't there in the womb with the baby to see it writhe in pain, the baby's pain must not exist.
It would follow that neither does "a baby."
Crossposted at Redstate.
