On Tuesday, the members of the House of Representatives will assemble in the U.S. Capitol Building to cast their votes yea or nay on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act–H.R. 36.
The two-fold organizing principle that undergirds the pro-abortion playbook will be on display in force: an appeal to authority and rhetorical sleight of hand. We will hear how the Medical Establishment is firm in its preordained conviction that a 20-week old unborn child can’t experience horrific pain as she is ripped apart. Indeed some go so far as to insist the child can’t experience pain until the 29th week–or perhaps not until birth!
But as National Right to Life has explained
By 20 weeks after fertilization, all the physical structures necessary to experience pain have developed. Unborn children at 20 weeks fetal age react to painful stimuli, and their hormonal reactions consistent with pain can be measured. For the purposes of surgery on unborn children, fetal anesthesia is routinely administered and is associated with a decrease in stress hormones compared to their level when painful stimuli are applied without such anesthesia.
Supplementing this is the insistence that abortions at 20 weeks (and beyond!) are as rare as births at Planned Parenthood. But, of course, these abortions aren’t “rare” at all.
To quote an NRLC Fact Sheet on Fetal Pain:
Based purely on published surveys, there are about 275 sites that provide abortions past the 20-week fetal age (22 weeks LMP) line contained in H.R. 36. But there are reasons to believe that such surveys under-estimate the prevalence of late abortions. There is growing evidence that they are far more common than most people want to believe.
SIGN THE PETITION! Congress Must Ban Late-Term Abortions
Remember that abortionists have zero incentive to accurately date how old the baby is and that many of the states that abort the most babies have no reporting requirements! So whatever number is tossed out tomorrow will radically underestimate the number of abortions performed at 20 weeks and beyond.
An additional point. NRL News Today has written a small library worth of stories about convicted murderer, Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. We quoted most of a 200+ page Grand Jury on a man eventually convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter.
On page 171, we read that for the years 200-2010, Gosnell reported one second-trimester abortion.
Yet it appears (pp. 26-27, 88) that Gosnell probably performed thousands of second-trimester and third-trimester abortions during that decade. Multiple other practitioners who perform large volumes of late abortions have also failed to report or not been required to report.
Conclusion is the same: an untold but large number of second and third trimester abortions are not reported.
We will have more to say, both later today, and tomorrow. Just do not allow yourself to be fooled by the pro-abortion propaganda line that will be reflexively, uncritically, and with enthusiasm reported by the Establishment Media.
This is a very important vote, a stepping stone to ending an atrocity of astonishing proportions.
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.
