A Pain Too Awful to Imagine.(abortion)

Proponents of unrestrained abortion who have launched a nationwide legal strategy challenging the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act may get far more than they bargained for, following a judge's crucial pre-trial decision to admit evidence on fetal pain.

Judge Richard Casey of the Southern District of New York ruled on March 19 that an attempt by the ACLU, the National Abortion Federation, and several abortion doctors to preclude testimony about fetal pain, on the grounds that it was "irrelevant and insufficiently reliable," should be denied. He thus opened the trial to hear expert testimony from Dr. K.S. Anand, the world's foremost authority on research into pain perception in the fetus and newborn child. This prospect is one that abortion supporters can only dread, for it lends an eloquent and expert voice to their vulnerable targets - - the unborn children destroyed by partial-birth abortion - - whose silent agony will now be laid out in a public court of law in stark, clinical terms by a witness whose expertise is unassailable.

Judge Casey had obviously done his homework, for his Memorandum and Order denying the pro-abortion motion itemized several categories of research evidence supporting the conclusion that the fetus feels pain by 20 weeks gestation, a fact well known to readers of NRL News over the past few years.

Since partial-birth abortion is usually done after 20 weeks (4-1/2 months), fetal pain testimony is not only highly relevant but likely to be quite damaging to the pro-abortion cause. Indeed, the testimony on fetal pain awareness is likely not only to harden the disgust felt by most Americans for PBA, but threatens to rip the cover off their denial that there is solid research pointing to fetal pain awareness even before 20 weeks.

The evidence on fetal pain perception has been building for the past 20 years. Pain receptors first appear in the skin of an unborn baby's face at just eight weeks gestation and have gradually covered the body several weeks later. Pain signals are sent from the receptors back along nerves to the spinal cord and then up to the brain's pain relay station, the thalamus, a connection that is fully wired by 14 weeks.

The final connection from the deeply-located thalamus up to the cerebral cortex on the brain's surface (where the baby is made aware of pain) is fully wired by 20 weeks. This is the time in pregnancy - - the exact half-way point - - when scientists have solid evidence of a fully-connected pain system.

While critics have contended that a fetus at this stage does not possess the consciousness necessary to be aware of pain, at 20 weeks the fetus has the full complement of neurons present in adulthood. Brain waves can be recorded at 20 weeks by a standard electroencephalogram (EEG). These findings were reviewed in Dr. Anand's landmark 1987 article, "Pain and its effects on the human neonate and fetus," in the New England Journal of Medicine.