Abortion With "Compassion"

[bobbcat]

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Exerpt:

"It is my opinion that the human fetus possesses the ability to experience pain from 20 weeks of gestation, if not earlier," says Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, a pediatrician who directs the Pain Neurobiology Laboratory at Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute. Dr. Jean Wright, head of the division on pediatric critical care at Emory University School of Medicine, says premature babies born at 23 weeks respond to pain just as full-term infants do. Fetuses at earlier stages, she says, may be even more sensitive.

Not everyone agrees. But this is one instance where it makes perfect sense to err on the side of caution by assuming that the capacity for pain develops earlier rather than later--just as surgeons do when they operate on fetuses, something typically done as early as 20 weeks.

Why is it controversial to suggest that a woman may benefit from having sound information about her fetus? No one objects to laws against cruelty to animals. There, we figure, the least we can do is minimize the pain inflicted on a helpless creature. Even if a fetus has no rights of its own, what's the harm in confronting its capacity to suffer?

The answer is simple. Abortion-rights advocates know this measure would not impede any woman who wants an abortion. But the bill does something that they understand is terribly dangerous to their cause: It recognizes that the "choice" to have an abortion involves not only a woman and her doctor, but also the fetus--a living entity with unmistakable human characteristics. And that way lies trouble.

Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation's biggest abortion provider, accuses supporters of "trying to elevate the status of the fetus above that of the woman." But it doesn't elevate dogs above people to say that canines may not be destroyed in an inhumane manner.

Planned Parenthood's problem is that the bill gives the fetus any consideration at all, because it reminds people that abortion is not just another medical procedure. Abortion-rights supporters know the real reason many Americans have reservations about abortion is not that they want to force women into traditional roles, deny them choices or stamp out birth control. It's because they think killing a fetus is uncomfortably close to killing an infant. Talk about fetuses experiencing pain only encourages that sort of thinking, and there is no telling where it might lead.

I hope this leads to more women taking more care in thinking through just what they are really doing when they take that plunge into exercising that "choice."

[mayor]

If wombs had windows, abortion would be illegal

Anyone disagree? If so, why?