Dear Colleague:
In the wake of the March for Life, the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act is
next on Congress' pro-life agenda.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
28 January 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 4
The Next Legislative Battle: Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
The next titanic struggle for Americans who want to protect unborn
children will most likely be U.S. Supreme Court nominations. The Supreme
Court, not elected representatives, currently makes law on questions of
this kind, and pro-lifers know it is crucial to get jurists who believe in
the Constitution onto the court in order to right this inverted system.
The pro-abortion lobbies know how important it is to keep such jurists
off. In the meantime, the next piecemeal political step toward educating
the public about the realities of abortion was reintroduced in Congress
this week: the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act.
Rep. Chris Smith (R.-N.J.), fresh from removal as chairman of the House
Veterans Affairs Committee by a vindictive House Republican leadership
(supposedly for wanting to spend too much money on veterans), delivered
another powerfully pro-life speech in reintroducing the legislation
(numbered HR 356 in the House). Speaking on the House floor the day after
the annual March for Life, Smith said, "Yesterday, 100,000 human rights
advocates endured the numbing cold and snow in a great witness for life
here in our Nation's Capital. Their presence on behalf of those who have
no voice of their own was truly inspiring. . . . The pro-life movement is
the greatest human rights movement on Earth. It is a struggle based on
unconditional love, even for the pro-abortionists, unconditional empathy
for the victims, both the child and his or her mother, and unconditional
courage. We are a movement with deep hope and expectation, that with
God's all-powerful grace, and through that all-powerful grace, the culture
of death will soon be vanquished by the culture of life, where all human
life is cherished and respected. We pray for the day when branding an
unborn child as unwanted will no longer mean a death sentence in America.
Mr. Speaker, I have always found the term 'unwanted child' dehumanizing,
for it relegates a child to the status of a commodity, an object, a thing,
something that can be chosen or unchosen at will, not unlike any other
consumer product."
The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act will not restrict access to abortion.
Instead, it will require abortion clinics to educate women about the
possible effect of abortion on their unborn children. Women will learn
that there is considerable scientific evidence that unborn children 20
weeks or older feel pain during abortions. "Now we learn, Mr. Speaker,"
said Smith, "from science and medicine that due to nerve cell development,
unborn children from at least 20 weeks onward, and most likely even
earlier, feel excruciating pain, two to four times more pain than you or I
would feel from the same assault."
Women at 20 or more weeks of pregnancy would be told about the pain their
children will feel. The bill would give the aborting woman the choice of
having direct anesthesia given to her unborn child before he or she is
killed. "Indirect administration does not cross the placenta to numb the
pain that the child feels as they are being slowly dismembered by these
later-term abortion methods," Smith noted. "One of those methods, the D
and E, takes about 30 minutes as the arms and the legs and the body and
the torso are all hacked off. And the baby feels pain during this hideous
procedure."
Sen. Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.) reintroduced the bill in the Senate, where it
is designated S 51. Brownback succeeded in getting almost one-third of
the 100-member Senate to back the bill from the start. It has 32
co-sponsors including Brownback himself. Unfortunately, unlike in the
House, no Democrats co-sponsored the Senate bill, not even Minority Leader
Harry Reid (D.-Nev.), who is often promoted as a moderate pro-lifer.
"Unborn children can experience pain even more so than adults as the baby
has more pain receptors per square inch than at any other time in its
life," said Brownback. "Any woman who has been blessed with a child in
the second trimester can attest to the reaction to touch and discomfort
felt by the baby. . . . After being presented with the medical and
scientific information on the development of the unborn child 20 weeks
after fertilization, the woman is more aware of the pain experienced by
the child during an abortion procedure, and can at the very least make an
informed decision." We can pray that some of these women will change
their minds about having an abortion.
The pro-abortion movement and the politicians in its pocket are so
devoutly dedicated to the culture of death that they will likely oppose
this purely informational bill, just as they vociferously defend the
appalling practice of partial-birth infanticide. The issue is not yet
ripe for debate in Congress, but should be soon.. When the time comes, be
ready to express, to your elected representatives, your opinion about
informing women of the pain late-term abortions cause. In the meantime,
you may want to read for yourself what abortionists have to say about
children's pain during abortion in a collection of court testimony on the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' website,
http://www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/pba/pbaban.htm.
Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.
PRI
P.O. Box 1559
Front Royal, VA 22630
USA
Phone: (540) 622-5240 Fax: (540) 622-2728
Email: jad@pop.org
Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
(540) 622-5240, ext. 204
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