Abortion Activist: It’s Okay to Kill Babies in Abortions Because They Don’t Feel Pain Until Birth

Opinion   |   Dave Andrusko   |   Jan 31, 2018   |   7:02PM   |   Washington, DC

We all know the French adage, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Never, ever was that more true than in listening to the pro-abortion drivel on display yesterday in the Senate as Democrats successfully prevented Republicans from cutting off a filibuster of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. (Sixty votes were needed to “invoke cloture” so there could have been an up or down vote.)

But I was wrong. There is a worse example of recycling myths, fables, and fairytales about fetal pain. I didn’t notice it at the time but evidently Maggie Fox of NBC News had read twitter posts from a “doctor” and decided to interview him after the Senate vote.

By way of preface, Fox can be very perceptive reporter, but less so when she wanders into politics. For example, “the doctor just explained late-term abortion—on Twitter” is Dr. Daniel Grossman.

Grossman is not some ordinary M.D. He is a nearly full-time abortion apologist who composes such convoluted half-truths it takes five times as much space to rebut them as for him to compose them.

For example, he tells Fox

“I really feel like it’s important for policymakers, legislators, to use the best available scientific evidence when they are making policy related to health. I also think it’s important for them to listen to the patients that are affected by this healthcare and neither of those things were done related to this recent bill.”

Small problem. Everything—everything—he told Fox is wrong. Demonstrably wrong. Wrong in the sense of being debunked years ago.

For instance, using data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, we’ve already posted many times (and again today) that they understand that the reasons women have “late abortions” are not (as Grossman says)

for many reasons…including a late diagnosis of a severe fetal abnormality that means it would not survive after birth, or be in severe pain.

Women may also need an abortion to save their lives.

“Many reasons,” yes, but reasons having to do with relationship problems, having other children, suffering from depression, or denying to themselves they are pregnant/putting off a decision.

Grossman, for example, wrote and talked a lot about abortion clinic closings in Texas, but never fully disclosed why they closed, something our own Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon did in much detail on these pages.

But the principal gaffe—and it is colossal—is his breezy assurance that “Research has shown a fetus does not yet have the capacity to experience pain until at least the third trimester, and unlikely until birth.”

Keep up with the latest pro-life news and information on Twitter.

Birth?! Yikes. This is so over-the-top, so at odds with research as to be almost laughable. Grossman is presumably relying on the infamous August 24, 2005 study in JAMA authored by pro-abortion activists, a canard which NRLC, among others, demolished more than a decade ago.

But you kind of understand why Grossman says this nonsense when he adds, “There is some data to suggest that the fetus is kind of in a semi-anesthetized state throughout all of the pregnancy and that all of the perceptions are blunted.”

He’s probably referring to a 2010 “Fetal Awareness” paper issued by Britain’s Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists (RCOG). As one neurologist said of the notion that the unborn child is not fully awake, “This belief has not been a topic on the radar screen of fetal pain discussions in recent years, and appears to come out of left field. It is hard to avoid the impression that the authors view this new proposal as a kind of scientific trump card.”

As so it goes. Grossman is sloppy and Fox can’t be bothered to even alert her readers to Grossman’s status as an abortionist and abortion apologist (or even correctly identify Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a Republican, not a Democrat).

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.