Premature babies can feel pain, scans show

Pro-Life/Pro-Baby ping!

Please FReepmail me if you would like to be added to, or removed from, the Pro-Life/Pro-Baby ping list...

FETAL PAIN:

Introduction: The fetus at 20 weeks gestation "is fully capable of experiencing pain. … Without question, all of this is a dreadfully painful experience for any infant subjected to such a surgical procedure." — Robert J. White, M.D., PhD., professor of neurosurgery at Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio, in testimony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, March 21, 1996

"Ultrasonographic findings report specific fetal movements in response to needle punctures in utero. When neonates are born prematurely at 23 weeks gestation, they demonstrate highly specific and well-coordinated physiologic and behavioral responses to pain … validating outside the uterus what they were capable of manifesting inside the uterus." — Jean A. Wright, M.D., M.B.A., Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Emory School of Medicine, White Paper: Advances in the Understanding of Fetal Pain, Christian Medical Association

In connection to the scientific fact that life begins at conception, science also proves beyond a doubt that the pre-born child experiences pain at 20 weeks, and at earlier ages as well at differing levels of perception.

This fact was brought out in open US federal court proceedings in 2004. Horrific testimony was entered into the official record each day in three separate federal District Court cases, each filed to stop the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, an Oxford and Harvard trained neonatal pediatrician and pain expert testified at the New York federal court hearings on April 13, 2004. Below is an excerpt from WORLD Magazine April 24, 2004 issue. The title of the article was Painfully unaware:

Dr. Anand took the stand in the morning and testified for hours that unborn children can feel pain even more vividly than adults or even infants. He said that by 20 weeks fetuses have developed all the nerve and brain functions to feel pain, but none of the coping mechanisms that help infants and adults to deal with the sensation. According to Dr. Anand's research, handling the fetus in the womb, delivering the child up to its head, slicing open its skull and sucking out the brains would all produce "prolonged and excruciating pain to the fetus."

The evidence for fetal pain is not new-Dr. Anand studied expressions of pain in unborn and neonatal children as early as the 1980s-but the legal argument is novel. Unlike previous legislative attempts to ban partial-birth abortion, Congress used a fetal-pain argument to rally support. If a fetus does feel pain as early as 20 weeks into the pregnancy, it bolsters Congress' ethical argument for banning the procedure. And in the courtroom it humanizes the unborn child in a way that the pro-life legal community has never been able to do.
http://www.worldmag.com/displayarticle.cfm?id=8807

The pro-abortion side attempts to lessen the horror of the reality of murdering children in the womb and the terrible pain that these babies endure while being aborted by claiming that late term abortions are rare. But that outright lie is exposed many times over, from around the world.

As reported by The Washington Times, on April 7, 2004, Dr. Anand also testified in federal district court in Lincoln, Nebraska in the suit there to stop the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Dr. Anand testified that: "I believe the fetus is conscious," and that the pain during this procedure is "severe and excruciating" to 20-week-old pre-born children.

Under cross-examination, Dr. Anand said he believes a less-controversial abortion procedure, known as "dilation and evacuation" (D&E), would cause the same amount of pain to a child. An estimated 140,000 D&Es, the most common method of second-trimester abortion, take place in the United States annually. http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040406-111818-1409r

Below are excerpts from Fr. Frank Pavone’s August 15, 2005 newsletter:

In 1994, an article in the prestigious British medical journal, the Lancet, revealed hormonal stress reactions in the fetus. The article concluded with the recommendation that painkillers be used when surgery is done on the fetus. The authors wrote, "This applies not just to diagnostic and therapeutic procedures on the fetus, but possibly also to termination of pregnancy, especially by surgical techniques involving dismemberment."

In 1991, scientific advisors to the Federal Medical Council in Germany had made a
similar recommendation.

In August 2001, Great Britain's Medical Research Council concluded that pain perception may be as early as 20 weeks; other studies place it as early as 10 weeks.

It should be noted that each year in the United States alone, over 18,000 abortions take place at 21 or more weeks of pregnancy.

The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act has now been introduced in Congress, to inform women having abortions at 20 weeks or more that their baby may feel pain. The legislation deserves our support. It would require that the mother be given the option to provide painkillers to her baby. This is not to justify abortion, but will certainly make many think twice about it. http://www.priestsforlife.org/columns/columns2005/05-08-15unbornpain.htm

Fetal Pain: Unborn babies suffer pain while they are being killed by abortion.

That is the startling conclusion of doctors and researchers, whose recent discoveries reveal the previously unknown sensory capacities of unborn children.

Until recently, most neonatalogists believed that babies in the womb were mostly immune to feeling pain. With the advent of sonograms and live-action ultrasound images, doctors and nurses began to see unborn babies at 20 weeks gestation react physically to outside stimuli such as sound, light and touch.

The sense of touch is so acute that even a single human hair drawn across an unborn child's palm causes the baby to make a fist.

More recently, surgeons entering the womb to perform corrective procedures on tiny unborn children have found that those babies will flinch, jerk and recoil from sharp objects and incisions. "In instances when a fetal bladder is obstructed and we need to go in and puncture it to drain the bladder, the unborn baby will pull away," explains Dr. Steven Calvin, a practicing perinatologist and chair of the Program in Human Rights in Medicine at the University of Minnesota, where he also teaches obstetrics. "The neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies."

The pain is agonizing

Since medical researchers now widely agree that unborn babies at 20 to 24 weeks gestation experience pain during prenatal surgery, they most certainly feel pain during abortion.

The obvious and horrifying conclusion is that millions of aborted unborn children have silently suffered greatly in their final minutes of life.

The most common methods used to abort unborn babies at 20 weeks gestation or more involve sharp-edged instruments to cut, tear and twist the baby's body into pieces, which are extracted from the womb. In a partial-birth abortion, the unborn baby is delivered feet first, except for the head, which is punctured at the base of the skull with a sharp object. The brains are then suctioned out, killing the child.

Abortion lies revealed
For decades, abortionists and abortion advocates have tried to convince people that physical suffering for unborn children during abortion is a myth.

Abortion became legal in the United States before sonograms became prevalent or photos of human life in the womb were readily accessible. Abortion became legal before researchers had taken time to study the issue of fetal pain. However, mounting new scientific evidence is removing any doubt that unborn children do, indeed, feel intense pain. Once again, the abortion industry's lies to the public have been uncovered.

Unborn babies have heightened sensitivities

According to Dr. Paul Ranalli, neurologist at the University of Toronto, unborn babies between 20 and 30 weeks development may actually feel pain more intensely than adults. He says this is a "uniquely vulnerable time, since the pain system is fully established; yet the higher-level pain-modifying system has barely begun to develop."

Given the medical evidence that unborn babies experience pain, compassionate people are viewing abortion more and more as an inhumane and intolerable brutality against defenseless human beings. http://www.mccl.org/fp_news/fetal_pain.htm

God Bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.

"While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that's free,
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer. "

God Bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.

Jeremiah 1:5
Before I formed thee in the womb I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

I liked the story , I will think about it the next time I smell rain on the way.

These people are monsters for thinking that a living human being would NOT feel pain. That they had to do a stupid brain scan to figure that out.

Hope you are doing well, sweetie.

Anyway, when I started working in the NICU 30 years ago, surgery was done on our premies using only Pavulon to paralyze them, because "babies did not feel pain".

The nurses could see the pain in the faces of the babies, but the docs would just laugh at us. Now that our machines are better, what we always knew was proven by increased heart rates and BPs.

It is proven that treating the pain is a big step in the healing process of the infants.

I feel so bad about the little ones from the past that weren't given anything to treat their pain.

And I'm livid that abortionists and their supporters deny the reality of fetal pain.

As a mother of a beautiful, healthy 31 week preemie (now 8 months) that story makes me cry every time I read it.

I know pre-term babies feel pain. My son cried at birth and would cry every time he got his heel stuck (at least during the times I was present).

Thanks for the ping!

I'm doing much better, thank you so much! Still have some "issues", but I seem to be past the worst of it, and my 5 day emergency treatment finished yesterday. I'm still overwhelmed by all the prayers and kindness shown by you and others to me.

You are on the front lines of what these babies endure, and everyone should read what you''ve written about this. You are a hero to me taking care of these little innocents. The pro-aborts will never acknowledge pain in the preborn, because that would humanize them, and they can't have that. Constantly-improving technology will eventually be their downfall... it's just a matter of time.

I used urban legends to check this out and it did occur. They just didn't know whether it was true that God smelled like rain, or that little children are particularly sensitive to the presence of God.

But we do . . .

Thanks for posting this!!

The little girl's mother sent the story to me ... I edited it for punctuation and syntax, some, but I think the Mother wrote the piece and it was published in a Texas newspaper. I was trying to put together a book of such stories and I'm still collecting stories, if you know of one or two to include.

Premature babies experience real pain rather than just displaying reflex reactions, scientists said yesterday.

Judges are ruling that it's unconstitutional to execute prisoners sentenced to death if it's too painful.

They better get busy and rule the same here!

Capital Criminals are considered human beings, the alive, sensing unborn babies are not ... by a majority of the secular priests in the black robes sitting on the subpreme court. Ending the abortion on demand 'rite' will disempower the democrap party and the insane feminists who believe the right to kill an alive unborn child makes the females 'goddesses untouchable'. There is of course a well founded principle upon which the abortion slaughter could be drastically reduced, the principle of self defense, but even that principle applied in rape and life of the woman would not/should not be deemed a right to a dead unborn child if the pregnancy could be sustained to a 30 to 36 week delivery date. But then the Pubbies would be disempowered because their valued abortion 'issue' would no longer sustain votes as it has for so long.

I used to work in a NICU....

Trust me...25 week old babies feel pain.