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
