Montana governor Greg Gianforte has signed three pro-life bills into law, the most notable of which prohibits abortion after 20 weeks’ gestation, around the point at which premature newborn infants are able to survive outside the womb with significant medical assistance. The legislation, called the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” is based on scientific evidence suggesting that unborn children have the capacity to feel pain at about 20 weeks.
The second bill Gianforte signed requires that abortionists give a mother the opportunity to view an ultrasound of her unborn child and listen to his or her heartbeat before deciding to have an abortion. Contrary to the assertions of abortion advocates, the law does not require that women take that opportunity.
The third bill requires that women receive a prescription for chemical-abortion drugs in person rather than via a telemedicine appointment. Despite Democratic officials’ successful efforts to relax federal safety guidelines for these drugs, pro-life lawmakers aim to institute safety protocols at the state level. Because the drugs used in a chemical abortion carry the risk of significant side effects and complications for women, pro-lifers argue that women will be better equipped with initial counseling and appropriate follow-up care if they receive the first of the two drugs at an in-person appointment.
Naturally, none of these policies has been well received by supporters of legal abortion, including its not-so-secret supporters at mainstream media outlets. Covering the news at CNN, reporter Caroline Kelly asserts that the 20-week ban is “based on the scientifically disputed notion that a fetus can feel pain at that point in development.” Kelly cites an advocacy memo from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) — which operates more as a political-action group than a medical organization when it comes to abortion — stating that fetuses are not capable of feeling pain until at least 24 weeks’ gestation, a claim that comes from a 2005 scientific review.
For one thing, this assertion ignores the reality that ACOG would not support a ban on abortion after 24 weeks’ gestation, either, even if the group is willing to acknowledge that fetal pain receptors might be active after that point. But, despite noting that the question of fetal pain is “scientifically disputed,” Kelly ignores all of the evidence on the other side of the ledger.
For instance, she makes no mention of this paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics from last January, in which two medical researchers with “divergent views regarding the morality of abortion” argue based on recent neuroscientific data that unborn human beings likely are able to feel pain at an earlier point than previous research has suggested. Their review of scientific literature on fetal neural development and the psychology of pain sensation — including far most recent data than the information in the 2005 study cited by ACOG — concluded that unborn babies likely could experience pain as early as 12 weeks’ gestation.
Meanwhile, according to a review of relevant data from the Lozier Institute, scientific studies of fetal reactions in the womb suggest that unborn babies are capable of responding to painful stimuli long before 24 weeks. As early as eight weeks’ gestation, unborn children exhibit reflex movement during invasive procedures. As early as 18 weeks’ gestation, they exhibit hormonal stress responses such as “increases in cortisol, beta-endorphin, and decreases in the pulsatility index of the fetal middle cerebral artery.”
Two independent studies in 2006 verified via brain scans that unborn children can respond to pain earlier in pregnancy, as the scans indicated a “clear cortical response,” suggesting that there was “the potential for both higher-level pain processing and pain-induced plasticity in the human brain from a very early age.”
None of this information appears in Kelly’s article, as acknowledging its existence would contradict the preferred claim that abortion bans based on fetal pain are unscientific. In fact, there is plenty of scientific evidence suggesting that it is at least possible, if not likely, that unborn children are capable of feeling pain earlier in pregnancy than abortion supporters are willing to admit.
This oversight on Kelly’s part is not especially surprising. She is the same reporter who, in a news article last February, referred to a newborn infant that survives an attempted abortion procedure as “a fetus that has been born” — presumably, most of us without an agenda would refer to that entity as . . . a baby.