Posted on 09/23/2006 11:11:13 AM PDT by wagglebee
Congressman Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) re-introduced the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act today (H.R. 6099) with 65 cosponsors. The bill will likely receive a floor vote sometime next week. H.R. 6099 was introduced in both the 108th and the 109th Congress by Rep. Smith and by Senator Brownback (R-Kansas).
The re-introduction of the bill includes some revisions, such as a removal of the provision allowing for mandatory revocation of medical licenses for abortion providers who violate the law. However, financial penalties of up to $250,000 remain.
H.R. 6099 would require abortion providers to notify women who want to have an abortion 20 weeks after fertilization that the evidence suggests their unborn child feels pain and they may request anesthesia for their unborn child in order to reduce or eliminate the pain. This legislation would not require anesthesia and it specifically protects the doctor's right to inform the woman of any risks to her according to his or her own best medical judgment.
The recent Partial-Birth Abortion Ban trials have drawn new attention to the pain that unborn children feel during an abortion. In expert testimony during those trials, Dr. Sunny Anand, Director of the Pain Neurobiology Laboratory at Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute, explained:
The human fetus possesses the ability to experience pain from 20 weeks of gestation, if not earlier, and the pain perceived by a fetus is possibly more intense than that perceived by term newborns or older children ... the highest density of pain receptors per square inch of skin in human development occurs in utero from 20 to 30 weeks gestation. During this period, the epidermis is still very thin, leaving nerve fibers closer to the surface of the skin than in older neonates and adults.
Congress even requires pain to be minimized for livestock which are slaughtered. How much more then should Congress seek to minimize the pain an unborn child feels when he or she is aborted?
An April 15 17, 2004, Zogby Poll found that 77% of the public favor "laws requiring that women who are 20 weeks or more along in their pregnancy be given information about fetal pain before having an abortion."
"Whether you are for or against capital punishment, this much is true: convicted murderers who have enjoyed due process rights are sedated before they receive a lethal injection. Surely innocent, unborn babies at the very least deserve to be anesthetized from such unbearable pain. Certainly, no surgeon would operate in utero without giving the baby anesthesia," said Jan LaRue, CWA's chief counsel.
Pro-abortion advocates contest that allowing the government to acknowledge that a baby feels pain during an abortion will elevate the status of an unborn child to something more than the lump of tissue they contend it to be.
But as CWA's president Wendy Wright points out, no baby deserves this kind of treatment. "Every unborn baby deserves to be treated with respect, but until abortion is outlawed, we should at least ensure the death is not excruciating."
CWA supporters are urged to contact their Representatives to encourage them to cosponsor and support H.R. 6099 so that Congress can pass this important legislation before it recesses for campaign season. Capitol Hill Switchboard: 202-224-3121.
The left is far more concerned with pleasing PETA than it is with protecting human beings.
Pro-Life Ping
bump
Interested in the science - do you have a link to an objective scientific study about pain in the fetus? Last I read, I thought the scientific community didn't find the science to support this. It's been a while though.
http://www.fetal-pain.com/fetal_pain_research.htm
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/fetal_pain/index.html
http://www.nrlc.org/news/2004/NRL04/a_pain_too_awful_to_imagine.htm
http://www.mccl.org/fp_news/fetal_pain.htm
Holy mackeral, what have we become? Do they not understand this twisted logic? It feels, it breathes, it sleeps, it eats...yet it's not protected from death because some want to call it anything but a human being? Would we be sedating the baby with this legislation or those wanting to continue with abortions?
How sad it is.
Sorry, I was looking for the objective research papers, not summaries or press releases. The first link goes to a site that appears to have research links, but those don't work, the other sites are essays or press releases. Any research paper links you can give me?
If you are a physician, you probably have research sites that have links to these studies.
The left says screw the unborn. They are more concerned that killers experience pain while being executed.
Conclusions Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester. Little or no evidence addresses the effectiveness of direct fetal anesthetic or analgesic techniques. Similarly, limited or no data exist on the safety of such techniques for pregnant women in the context of abortion. Anesthetic techniques currently used during fetal surgery are not directly applicable to abortion procedures.It's interesting that this review was focused on surgical techniques, and makes that distinction from abortion-procedure anesthesia. If you find references about this topic, I'm interested in what differences there are. (Also note the limitations of this above study cited in its abstract.)
The American Medical Association is hardly an unbiased group on infanticide.
Someday, through their perseverance and the efforts of others....
the truth will come to light for the whole world to see.
from your lips to God's ear
Pure grandstanding.
Not all elected Republicans are pro-life. The RINOs are mostly pro-death for the unborn.
What grandstanding? Do you mean to say that legislation protecting livestock from pain is valid, but not unborn human babies?
What a lovely post! :)
The reason I want to see the studies is to see if there is a scientific basis for this law. From a scientific background, I'm naturally interested in the science.
I'm not equating the two, but to pursue your own analogy, when a veterinarian removes a pregnant uterus, or does a medical abortion on a pet, I don't think they use anesthesia for the fetuses. Which doesn't mean much, except that analogy is slippery and easily takes one off course. Scientifically speaking, a fetus at certain stages does not have the same capabilities as a full term infant. You cite a baby who reached out of the womb, but that doesn't mean that a 20 week fetus could do the same thing.
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