Pro-Life Groups Coalesce Around New Fetal Pain Legislation

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- With President Bush signing three major pro-life bills into law, the question for pro-life lawmakers in Congress is what next.

That question was answered this week when leading pro-life groups joined with sponsors of new legislation that would make women considering abortions aware of the pain an unborn child suffers during an abortion.

With most of the leading pro-life organizations issuing statements backing the legislation, the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act will likely replace the partial-birth abortion ban and Unborn Victims Of Violence Act as the top legislative priority.

Gail Quinn of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the legislation would bring "public attention to the pain suffered by unborn children whose lives are ended by abortion."

"There is near unanimous agreement that the unborn feel significant pain by their 20th week," added Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. "A mother considering abortion should be made aware of this face and provided with the opportunity to ease her unborn child's pain before she submits her child to the pain and death of an abortion."

The bill also enjoys the support of pro-life groups such as the Family Research Council, National Right to Life, and Concerned Women for America.

Sponsors of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act hope to have hearings held and a vote taken on the legislation prior to the November elections.

"We're going full-court press" on the bill, Rep. Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey Republican who is sponsoring the measure in the House, said at the press conference announcing the legislation.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports that Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, is planning to ask Senate leaders to attach the legislation to another bill that comes before the Senate.

The push for the legislation comes as a result of testimony given during the partial-birth abortion ban trials. Abortion advocates filed three lawsuits seeking to overturn the prohibition of the gruesome procedure.

"The recent partial-birth-abortion ban trials have cut through the denial and drawn attention to the pain that unborn children feel during an abortion," Congressman Smith explained.

Backers of the bill also point to the use of anesthesia in surgeries on babies before birth.

The University of California at San Francisco is one of the leading centers in the world that performs surgeries on unborn children in utero. Although doctors there provide general anesthesia for women on whose babies the doctors are operating, separate anesthesia is given to the unborn child during the fetal surgery to make sure the baby doesn't feel pain during the operation.

In addition to informing women about the pain unborn children feel during an abortion, abortion practitioners are required to allow women to have the opportunity to administer anesthesia medicine to their baby before the abortion procedure begins.

Those who perform abortions without following the bill's requirements face fines and may be subject to losing their medical licenses.

The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act is HR 4420 and already has 27 co-sponsors in the House.

Here's a true story about a little girl born premature, and the pain she experienced at such a premie age.

Smell Of Rain: The story of Danae comforted on God's chest

A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the Doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. Still groggy from surgery, her husband David held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news. That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the couple's new daughter, Danae Lu Blessing.

At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound and nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature. Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs. 'I don't think she's going to make it', he said, as kindly as he could. "There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one".

Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Danae would likely face if she survived. She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.

"No! No!" was all Diana could say. She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away.

Through the dark hours of morning as Danae held onto life by the thinnest thread, Diana slipped in and out of sleep, growing more and more determined that their tiny daughter would live-and live to be a healthy, happy young girl. But David, fully awake and listening to additional dire details of their daughter's chances of ever leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy, knew he must confront his wife with the inevitable.

David walked in and said that we needed to talk about making funeral arrangements. Diana remembers 'I felt so bad for him because he was doing everything, trying to include me in what was going on, but I just wouldn't listen, I couldn't listen.' I said, "No, that is not going to happen, no way! I don't care what the doctors say; Danae is not going to die! One day she will be just fine, and she will be coming home with us!" As if willed to live by Diana's determination, Danae clung to life hour after hour, with the help of every medical machine and marvel her miniature body could endure.

But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana. Because Danae's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love. All they could do, as Danae struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl. There was never a moment when Danae suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there.

At last, when Danae turned two months old, her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time. And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero, Danae went home from the hospital--just as her mother had predicted.

Today, five years later, Danae is a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She shows no signs, what so ever, of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she is everything a little girl can be and more-but that happy ending is far from the end of her story.

One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ballpark where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing.

As always, Danae was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent. Hugging her arms across her chest, Danae asked, "Do you smell that?"

Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like rain."

Danae closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?"

Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet, it smells like rain.

Still caught in the moment, Danae shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest."

Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Danae then happily hopped down to play with the other children. Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along. During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Danae on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.

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