Today’s scientific understanding of the unborn child is far beyond what it was in 1973 when the United States Supreme Court handed down its infamous Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Thirty-nine years ago, the unborn child virtually did not exist in medicine. But over those decades, medical science has exponentially expanded our knowledge about and understanding of the unborn child’s development.
For example, it wasn’t until the late 1970s when ultrasound made it possible to see the unborn child that the eyes of many were opened and the concept of the unborn child as a patient was born. It was the beginning of a sub-specialty that we know today as fetal medicine.
It is amazing how far prenatal medicine has come in such a short time. For instance, the ever increasing development of ultrasound has allowed doctors to see smaller and smaller details of the unborn child’s anatomy, and enabled physicians to perform surgery on unborn children.
1981 marked the year of the world’s first open fetal surgery, performed at the University of California. Once highly experimental, surgery on unborn children is now a frequent occurrence at several hospitals around the country.
Due to the ever-increasing resort to fetal surgery, physicians were able to observe unborn children experiencing pain during the surgery. This led them to study the pain of the unborn child. Subsequently they began to recommend that anesthesia be administrated when the unborn child has achieved 20 weeks of development, which is at about the start of the sixth month.
Because of this new interest, there is now substantial medical evidence which demonstrates that pain receptors (nociceptors) are present throughout the unborn child’s entire body and that nerves link these receptors to the brain’s thalamus and subcortical plate by no later than 20 weeks.
We also know that by eight weeks after fertilization, the unborn child reacts to touch. And that after twenty weeks, the unborn child reacts to stimuli that, if applied to an adult human, would be recognized as painful. For example, you can see the child recoil from the painful stimuli.
As mentioned, we know that fetal anesthesia is administered when surgery is performed on unborn children. As a result there is an associated decrease in stress hormones as compared to the level when painful stimuli are applied without such anesthesia.
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act will be introduced in several state legislatures this year. If passed in those states, it would protect pain-capable unborn children from being killed by abortion. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is grounded in a moral empathy that resonates loudly with the American people: “You don’t kill unborn children who are capable of feeling pain.”
Five states–Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho, Oklahoma and Alabama–have passed this law, and it is now illegal to kill pain-capable unborn children in those states. To date no serious legal challenge has been mounted to any of these laws.
And we know that the law works. The abortionist who did late abortions in Nebraska no longer does them in Nebraska. He was thinking of going to Kansas, but has not set up shop there. Why? Because both those states passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
Pro-abortionists forever tell us that pro-lifers want to “take us back.” In fact what makes the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act so dangerous to Roe is that it demands precisely the opposite. Rather than freezing our understanding of fetal development at what was available to the U.S. Supreme Court 39 years ago, the bill says, “Come, let’s see what we know now what we didn’t know then.”
“Let us look into the window to the womb.”
Mary Spaulding Balch, State Legislative Counsel, National Right to Life