Abortion Activist Amanda Marcotte Claims Unborn Babies Don’t Feel Pain Until “Around 29 Weeks”

Opinion   |   Dave Andrusko   |   May 7, 2018   |   10:51AM   |   Washington, DC

For very understandable reasons, pro-abortionists panic at the very thought of any discussion (let alone a wide-ranging discussion) of the merits of tearing apart pain-capable unborn babies 20 weeks (and older). It isn’t an enviable position to be in.

What to do? Talk about abortion in the abstract. The concrete details of shredding limbs and severing heads in a topic they don’t dwell on.

That’s why, for example, earlier in the year while the Senate was trying to overcome pro-abortion obstructionism, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) intoned that abortions is “safer than getting your tonsils out.” Even coming from a pro-abortion automaton like Warren, it was painful to watch, but nothing like what a baby goes through as she has her arms sheared off.

Scratch a pro-abortionist and reflexively they burble how the public “supports choice.” But is that true when the object of that “choice” is a well-developed unborn child?

Of course not. Opposition always is in the 60%+ range.

As shown by a nationwide poll taken Election Day 2016 by The polling company, inc./WomanTrend, almost two-thirds support (64%) for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act—well more than double (28%) those who opposed.

Support for the bill in the poll extended across all demographic and geographic boundaries. For example

  • Millennial voters 78% support
  • Women voters 67% support
  • African Americans 70% support
  • Hispanics 57 % support

Faced with that deep and wide support for the bill, what’s a pro-abortionist to do? Skip around the inconvenient bloody truth about what happens and to whom when a pain-capable baby is aborted, and mumble about “choice.”

A perfect example is pro-abortion scribe Amanda Marcotte who announced recently that she’s discovered “How the anti-abortion movement helped invent fake news,” sub-headed, “Anti-abortion activists trained the right to accept and perpetuate lies. Now the problem has metastasized.”

Now to be clear, truth is always the first casualty with Marcotte talks about abortion. This is the same Amanda Marcotte who in 2015 (referencing singer Nicki Minaj) urged us to see that pregnancy is like “when you break your leg” and abortion is the “cast.”

Or who in the same year declared that “Actual biologists, for what it’s worth, argue that life is continuous and that a fertilized egg is no more or less alive than a sperm or an unfertilized egg.”

This is misdirection not worthy of a ninth grade biology student. As Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life’s Paul Stark astutely observed, this “is to confuse ‘life’ in the sense of all life everywhere on the planet going back to the beginning with the life of an individual human being.”

Or the same Marcotte who this year announced that “legitimate scientists say that the earliest possibility that unborn babies can feel pain is around 29 weeks.”

Twenty-nine weeks? Please.

And those are just three of many bizarre examples.

So what is she argued (again) in her Salon post? It is almost embarrassing to go through her “argument,” but at its simplest (and it is all simple), Marcotte is asserting that the pro-life movement is really rooted in the old “Righteous Right” and that opposition to abortion is really cover for “hostility to women’s equality and sexual liberation.”

How original.

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Never mind that this is not even marginally true or that the Movement’s origins are far more complex and even more so today when there is a vast variety of new groups many of which are avowedly secular. Or that the Movement’s leadership has always been predominately female.

So with that dismal start, Marcotte rolls out some of the usual usuals and others excuses so old that even pro-abortionists are reluctant to dust them off.

By definition, we’re told, that there can be no after-effects from abortion, which is absurd on its face. It can’t be. Period, end of report.

And of course “fetuses” can’t feel pain in the second trimester. In fact that conclusion is backed with plenty of direct and indirect evidence. Clearly the unborn child is capable of experiencing excruciating pain at 20 week.

There are other half-baked, slipshod allegations from Marcotte, but if the goal is to smear, who cares? Throw enough mud and she and all of the others of her ilk, hope some will stick.

Talk about purveyors of Fake News.

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