The January 4 meeting of the Kentucky Senate Committee on Veterans, Military Affairs and Public Safety was brief. The group had convened, on just the second day of the 30-day session, to consider Senate Bill 5, a measure that had been labeled an “emergency.” Specifically, the bill would ban abortion after 20 weeks gestation, under the mistaken assumption that 20 weeks is the point at which a fetus feels pain, making abortion a cruel and unusual punishment.
Among those who spoke against the measure during the 35-minute meeting was a young, pregnant woman who with her husband was facing the sad reality that their wanted pregnancy might have to be aborted because of a life-threatening fetal abnormality that wasn’t detected until after the first trimester. All the tests needed for a prognosis could very well take her pregnancy up to or beyond the 20-week limit — if the law were to pass, that could either force her to abort early or continue to carry a non-viable fetus. A board-certified ob-gyn who also testified noted that both the American Medical Association and the Kentucky Medical Association oppose legislative interference into the doctor-patient relationship – and this bill does just that.
The committee asked no questions.
Republican state Sen. Brandon Smith in May 2015.
Photo: Adam Beam/AP
Republican Sen. Brandon Smith, the sponsor of the bill — known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act — told the committee he felt bad for the couple. He couldn’t remember their names, but said he could understand their pain, vaguely referencing some past personal experience that didn’t work out. Nonetheless, he said, the bill was necessary because medical science tells us that at 20 weeks a fetus can feel pain, and thus can feel what it’s like to be aborted. “We have got little ones out there that are going through some of the most awful painful experiences that you can have,” he said. “That we would even be fighting over it, amazing.”
The measure quickly passed out of the 14-man committee with little dissent, sailed through the rest of the General Assembly — controlled by Republicans for the first time in nearly 100 years — and was signed into law on January 9 by Gov. Matt Bevin. Because it was designated an emergency measure, the law went into effect immediately.
Kentucky is the 19th state to enact a 20-week fetal-pain abortion ban, a restriction that is a favorite among opponents of reproductive autonomy who would like to see abortion banned altogether. But there are two problems with the law. First, banning abortion outright before a fetus is viable outside the womb — generally understood to be at about 24 weeks — is illegal. Second, the idea that a fetus feels pain at 20 weeks contradicts the prevailing science relied upon by doctors, which is that the ability to feel pain doesn’t develop until closer to 30 weeks.
In short, the Kentucky ban and others like it are based on junk science.
Illegitimate State Interests
Forty-four years ago, on January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, a Texas case that solidified a woman’s legal right to abortion before the fetus is viable outside the womb.
While Roe may be settled law, the court has also noted that certain restrictions on abortion access may be constitutional, when the state has some legitimate interest to protect, and when the restrictions don’t place an undue burden on women seeking care. That proviso has allowed for some chipping away at the edges of Roe as lawmakers have placed an increasing number of onerous and unnecessary restrictions on access in the name of a state interest, but often by invoking questionable science or logic in order to justify them.
Lawmakers “always point to some reason why these are needed — whether it’s junk science from a medical perspective [or] psychological junk science — that women aren’t capable of making these decisions, or aren’t well informed,” said Sarah Wheat, chief external affairs officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas. “It’s the basis for every single one of these anti-abortion restrictions.”
Since 2011 alone the Center for Reproductive Rights has tracked 2,100 bills seeking to restrict access to reproductive health care. More than 300 of those have become law.
That junk science has infected the criminal justice system is now a well-accepted fact, thanks in part to the 2009 release by the National Academies of Science of a groundbreaking report that raised serious questions about the scientific validity and reliability of even the most venerated forensic practices, including fingerprint analysis.
Less well understood, however, is how deeply junk science has infected reproductive rights law. For several decades, foes of reproductive autonomy have sought to curtail access to abortion with a series of restrictions that are often sold as a way to protect a woman’s health and safety — but that just as often rely on a questionable foundation.
That is what happened in Texas in 2013 with the passage of an omnibus abortion bill mandating that the state’s abortion clinics transform themselves into costly, hospital-like facilities and that all abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of each clinic where they practice. The restrictions were necessary, the state argued, to protect the health and safety of women seeking care. But the state did not offer any proof that the provisions would improve anything — nor that there was anything in particular that actually needed improving.
In a June 27, 2016, ruling on those provisions in a case known as Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court confronted head-on the problem of junk science in the context of abortion access. In striking down the Texas restrictions, the court found that the abortion providers who had challenged the laws brought to the table hard evidence that great harm would result from the measures — evidence that was not rebutted by the state.
In Whole Woman’s Health, “the court said, facts matter; evidence matters,” said Sarah Lipton-Lubet, vice president for reproductive health programs at the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF). “And that should not be a radical notion, but with the onslaught of these bogus abortion restrictions that we’ve seen intensifying over the last several years it really was groundbreaking to state it that plainly.”
In the aftermath of the Whole Woman’s Health ruling, every court that encountered restrictions similar to those in Texas blocked them. But there is no indication that states will stop trying to pass such restrictions. Texas is currently trying to mandate burial of all fetal tissue, under the guise of improving health and safety, for example, while Kentucky rushed through its fetal pain measure, to name just two of the most recent examples.
While it’s unclear whether either of those measures will withstand court scrutiny, it is worth noting that each restriction falls firmly within the framework of junk science that has so infected women’s reproductive rights over the last few decades. Indeed, most of the measures considered or passed by lawmakers fit within notable categories or share similarly flawed conceits.
A counseling room at Whole Woman’s Health of San Antonio, Texas, on Feb. 9, 2016.
Photo: Eric Gay/AP
No Regrets
Among the most longstanding myths related to abortion is that most women feel deep regret afterward and that abortion inflicts longstanding psychological damage. “This idea that there is some psychological harm that happens after a patient gets an abortion … was kind of the first wave of junk science seeping into abortion policies,” said Amanda Allen, senior legislative counsel for the Center on Reproductive Rights. Anti-abortion activists have pushed this notion since at least the 1980s, and a coterie of sympathetic doctors and academics have produced works that purport to back up the claim.
The narrative has become so pervasive that lawmakers in numerous states have adopted the line without any good science to back it up. In an effort to prove the link, abortion foes in 1987 convinced President Ronald Reagan to have U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — a noted abortion opponent — study the health risks related to the procedure. After more than a year Koop had not turned in his report; he said there wasn’t enough good evidence to cite. Although the myth of mental harm has repeatedly been scrutinized, including by the American Psychological Association, the idea that better research needs to be done has persisted.
The same cannot be said today. The results of a groundbreaking study conducted by the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health research group at the University of California–San Francisco found no evidence that abortion causes mental health problems in women. Known as the Turnaway Study, researchers followed nearly 1,000 women — for 5 years, across 21 states — who fell into one of two groups: those who obtained an abortion, and those who sought abortion but were initially turned away for care and had to go elsewhere or who had to carry their pregnancies to term.
“We found no evidence that women who have abortions risk developing depression, anxiety, low self-esteem or less life satisfaction as a result of the abortion, either immediately following, or for up to five years after the abortion,” ANSIRH reported. “However, women who were denied an abortion had more anxiety, lower self-esteem, and less life satisfaction immediately after being turned away.” Ultimately, those symptoms decreased and the wellbeing of both groups equalized.
“This is an incredibly powerful study,” Dr. Roger Rochat, a former director of reproductive health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told The New York Times. “States will continue to pass laws that restrict access to abortion services and they will do it in part based on mental health effects of abortion. But the evidence of this study says that just isn’t true.”
Pamphlets displayed inside the waiting room of the Planned Parenthood Golden Gate offices in San Francisco.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty Images
Your Right to Know
Flowing from the contention that abortion is bad for a woman’s mental health came a wave of state laws requiring women to be counseled prior to undergoing the procedure, something a woman who would undertake such a supposedly risky psychological prospect would surely need.
Twenty-nine states now have laws on the books requiring abortion providers to supply patients with state-authored counseling materials, according to a NPWF report on questionable abortion restrictions titled “Bad Medicine.” The mandated materials cover a range of topics, from fetal development to pregnancy risks, and most contain serious misinformation.
Take, for example, Texas’ Woman’s Right to Know pamphlet, which suggests not only that a fetus feels pain at 20 weeks and that abortion can be psychologically damaging, but also asserts that there is likely a link between abortion and breast cancer — a notion that has been thoroughly debunked by the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. Texas is not alone in supplying women with this kind of erroneous information. In total, counseling materials in 12 states include information about fetal pain, nine emphasize negative psychological effects of abortion, and five include the nonexistent link between abortion and breast cancer.
Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that 26 states include medically inaccurate information about embryological or fetal development in their counseling materials, according to the Informed Consent Project at Rutgers University. Considering only medical statements regarding first trimester development, the rates of inaccuracy vary wildly – from 17 percent in Alabama’s materials to a whopping 68 percent in Michigan’s materials.
“To date, federal appellate courts have upheld challenges to informed consent laws in the states. Yet these affirmations have been based on assumptions of the medical accuracy of the information provided to women,” the Project’s researchers wrote in a 2016 article in Duke University’s Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. “Our study suggests that this is not the case.”
Ultrasound image.
Getty Images
Ultrasound And Other Acts of Coercion
The basics of informed consent are fairly straightforward: A patient should be given medically accurate information about the benefits and risks related to a given treatment or procedure and should understand and agree to potential consequences of care.
When it comes to abortion access, however, informed consent has become increasingly complicated, and is often not based on best medical practice.
While the passage of counseling mandates was the first in a wave of abortion-related restrictions sold as necessary to ensure a woman’s informed consent, in recent years lawmakers in many states have upped the ante, requiring mandatory ultrasound procedures and pre-abortion waiting periods as integral to the process.
Indeed, the 20-week abortion ban wasn’t the only restriction Kentucky lawmakers forced through the legislature earlier this month. Simultaneously, lawmakers hastily passed a requirement that each woman not only undergo an ultrasound prior to an abortion, but also that her doctor must display the image for her, describe what is seen in the image and make audible the fetal heartbeat, regardless whether the woman needs or wants to see or hear any of it.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Addia Wuchner, told her colleagues during a committee meeting that the measure was necessary in order to assure “autonomy” for women. If we respect women’s autonomy, she explained, then we should expect them to be informed, and she claimed this bill was about nothing more than ensuring that women are armed with as much scientific information as possible before making the decision to abort.
With passage of the law, Kentucky has become one of 14 states that have passed an ultrasound-before-abortion law and one of six that include a so-called display-and-describe provision.
As with so many other abortion restrictions, they’re medically unnecessary, especially because abortion providers as a matter of course regularly perform a pre-procedure ultrasound in order to confirm pregnancy and gestational age. “This process does not serve a medical need; rather, it serves to impart the state’s opposition to abortion,” concluded the “Bad Medicine” report. “It is a violation of medical standards to use a procedure to influence, shame or demean a patient.”
In keeping with that theme, many states — 31 in total — have also passed laws requiring a mandatory waiting period between when a woman first contacts an abortion provider and the time the doctor is actually allowed to perform the procedure. Waiting times range from 18 to 72 hours — in South Dakota, the 72-hour period excludes weekends and holidays, meaning a woman could wait as many as 6 days before being allowed to obtain an abortion after her first clinic appointment.
As with the other restrictions, waiting periods were sold as a means of ensuring that a woman makes a well-informed decision about seeking abortion. But in practice they have done little except add extra cost and burden to the process, usurping a woman’s ability to make her best medical decisions in private consultation with her doctor.
Consider the case of a Texas woman who recently visited Planned Parenthood seeking to terminate her pregnancy. The woman, said Planned Parenthood’s Wheat, had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer when she discovered she was pregnant. She already had young children and her oncologist strongly recommended that she terminate the pregnancy. Until she did so, she would not be able to start life-saving cancer treatment. In addition to being confronted with mandatory counseling material suggesting she could contract breast cancer from having the procedure, the woman had to submit to a display-and-describe ultrasound before having to wait at least 24 additional hours before being allowed to abort — a trifecta that ultimately delayed the start of her cancer treatment.
“There’s so many indignities: It’s stigmatizing, it’s dehumanizing. There are so many aspects to these restrictions,” said Wheat. “So, it’s like on any given day, what any one person is going through [determines] how those different restrictions affect them. That’s where you really see how awful these restrictions are.”
Trapped by TRAP Laws
In addition to the many regulations that use junk science or flawed logic to justify restricting a woman’s ability to access care there is another significant group of laws that more directly target abortion providers and the facilities where they operate.
Known as targeted regulations of abortion providers, or TRAP laws, these most commonly include the kinds of measure struck down in the Whole Woman’s Health case — mandating costly facility upgrades for clinics, regulations on the maximum allowable distance between a clinic and a hospital, and laws that require hospital admitting privileges or hospital transfer agreements for abortion doctors.
Importantly, according to the CRR’s Allen, underpinning TRAP regulations is a most insidious brand of junk science: The idea that abortion is not medically safe. There’s “this mythology more broadly around abortion being unsafe, when, of course, we know abortion is one of the absolutely most safe procedures that a woman can get.”
The mortality rate for first trimester abortion is less than 1 per 100,000 procedures, for example, compared to nearly 9 deaths per 100,000 live births. The risk of major complications arising from abortion is less than .23 percent.
Ironically, it was precisely the record of safety that prevented some doctors in Texas from obtaining the hospital admitting privileges that state lawmakers tried to require. “Physicians who specialize in abortion care are thwarted by the admitting privileges requirement, not because of any deficiency in their ability to perform safe abortions, but rather because their work is so safe that they do not admit enough patients to hospitals to qualify for privileges,” Physicians for Reproductive Health wrote in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in the Whole Woman’s Health case.
“Fundamentally, abortion is healthcare and, fundamentally, it is critical to women’s equality and to be able to participate fully in society. So access to quality, legal abortion care is good. That’s the fundamental principle,” said NPWF’s Lipton-Lubet. “In order to undermine that opponents of abortion really have to use these subterfuge techniques. Because if you’re telling the truth, that’s the truth you would tell.”
Top photo: A small plastic fetus is sometimes shown to women entering the Jackson Women’s Health Organization’s medical facility in Jackson, Miss., pictured in 2009.
Prolifers who seek to reduce or entirely take away Medicaid funding are guilty of killing babies and so are hypocrites. When low income people with high risk babies cannot afford medical care for their babies, the result is increased infant mortality- dead babies. You kill babies when low income people cannot access health care that their high risk babies need. What is a high risk baby? A high risk baby is one who may have been prematurely born, very low birth weight or have any number of severe medical conditions at birth such as congenital anomalies requiring immediate surgery. Who’s going to pay for their medical care? One way or another everyone does no matter how much you try to ignore it. Or, are you prolifers going to say that those babies should just die because they don’t deserve medical care since their parents can’t afford it? Cut Medicaid funding and you will be killing babies. FACT!
The only cases where I’ve seen anti-abortion opposition to Medicaid expansion and/or Medicaid continued funding are cases where the state’s Medicaid program covers elective abortions. Do you have any examples of anti-abortion organizations advocating against Medicaid where the state’s program doesn’t cover elective abortions?
There is no actual rule that says that anti-abortion people have to be Republicans, nor that Republican voters have to oppose Medicaid. Republican congressmen do what ever they are told, no exceptions, they ought to have to wear dippy fast food uniforms to remind us that they’re not in charge of anything but just stuffed suits filling seats for we know not what owners. But the voters aren’t getting paid and — in theory — can have whatever combination of beliefs they like.
They might even have voted Obama simply because he actually saw abortion rates go the lowest since Roe v. Wade allowed the number to be counted officially. The Republicans will promise that someday they’ll appoint a supreme court justice who someday will let a state someday make a law that somehow might prevent abortions, but improving the income of poor mothers, giving them better health care, giving any kids they produce better educational and career prospects — that fights abortion in the here and now.
Whether a fetus can feel pain or anything else is nothing but a distraction. Unfortunately, that distraction seems to have worked on at least some of you who are pro-choice. The FACT is that a fetus is a part of a woman’s body until it’s born, and should be treated as such. On top of that, overpopulation is the biggest problem on our planet, so every abortion helps. Abortions should be free, completely unrestricted, and widely available to everyone, PERIOD!!!
Sorry, I forgot to add a little explanation to my comment about fetuses feeling pain. Let’s put it this way: if it could be shown that cancerous tumors feel pain, should we pass laws prohibiting their removal? Regardless of the major differences between a cancerous tumor and a fetus, the fact remains that they are both part of a woman’s body, and an unwanted part for those women who want abortions. Another analogy is that all life feels pain, but everyone including vegans has to kill to eat. Etc. Pain is part of life and laws like this are just lame excuses to force the viewpoints of some people on everyone.
Roe v Wade is based on the 14th Amendment, the amendment that ended slavery. This fetus-as-property reasoning makes my flesh crawl. “Every murder helps” by this man’s reasoning. With humankind such a pestilence on the Earth, I expect that this man would happily offer a list of names for extermination if given the opportunity.
I think a more accurate way of looking at it is fetus-as-parasite.
Or do tapeworms have a “right to life” too?
Sorry, while it’s easy to suggest the law is based on junk science, in reality the law is an assault on women by christian supremacists, who use lies like what you call ‘junk science’ to destroy our freedoms based on the dictatorship of non-existent supernatural beings. There are no gods, like those the freaks use to dominate us, until the world begins to recognize the deception we will be subject to lies and hatred of these freaks to dictate over us. Stop putting up with this crap, we are on the road to the same outcomes as those theocratic dictatorships in other parts of the world. Begin to fight back, recognize there are no gods, all are non-existent supernatural beings, none of the thousands of so-called gods invented by man has ever been proven, none will ever be. I am being monitored as I write this, I am given warnings if these freaks don’t like what I write, even before I post it, which shows the power of these freaks that infect our media. Begin to fight back, even if all you can do immediately is to explore atheism, don’t let your children be infected by the false gods the freaks will force on them when they destroy separation of church and state.
@HippoDave: there is no currently accepted scientific theory of sentience. There is no accepted expert opinion that can tell you whether a fetus, cow, bird, stone, or Trump supporter “really” feels something.
There are traditional ways to try to guess — Saint Augustine of Hippo (you are *not* that one’s converse by any chance…?) based early Christian ideas, held until the Pope’s “infallible” revelation of the mid 1800s, mostly on what I presume was the physical appearance of what fetuses looked like. (There is a weird argument about 40 days of the Flood and male fetuses taking twice as long to develop, but I think that’s a tip-off in that it takes time for a weiner to become visible to the naked eye; I suspect in this one case church fathers fit doctrine to try to match the facts they observed rather than the other way around)
More generally, we assume that sentience is close to free will, and that free will eventually creates bizarre and unmistakable impacts on the environment. Kill cows, and the cows never gang up on you and gut you for revenge. Try the same with peasants, well, that one’s been done to death, and while the result may be fairly weak, it is positive. But fetuses are in a very poor position for such testing!
My own peculiar notion is that free will and qualia are both paranormal phenomena, and like all paranormal phenomena, are manifestations of precognition, which establishes loops of causality which serve as boundary conditions, and “readouts” when viewed in the other direction, of the universe. As such I would put special attention on the development of the hippocampus, which is said here to take rough adult form around 18-20 weeks ( https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Neural_-_Hippocampus_Development ). Yes, that’s a very peculiar argument, and very weak data, and a very vague model, but if you have better sing out. Just asserting that cows are sentient but fetuses are not — that’s not even a try, it’s a random guess.
A much better idea would be to stop playing god and just love and respect all life and the Earth itself equally. Humans have no business deciding which forms of life are better or more important, and it’s totally immoral to try to do so.
No mildew remover or flypaper for you, I take it? How does a vegetarian diet work out without the vegetables?
You’re making a decision between “forms of life”, I suspect. So life isn’t your criterion. What is?
You cite the “prevailing science” as an article from 2005. See 6b and its subsections from doctorsonfetalpain.com/fetal-pain-the-evidence/6-documentation/ for additional evidence from after 2005. Further, who decided that the burden of proof was on abortion opponents? You say: “Provide me proof that pain exists after 20 weeks.” They say: “Provide me proof that pain doesn’t exist at 20 weeks. Now 21 weeks. Etc.”
I agree with you Tim,
The above article does not really cite anything beyond that one report. A quick search on pubmed will indicate that there the pain perception may occur quite earlier, in any case, I wouldn’t say there is “consensus”
Example: J Pain Res. 2016 Nov 11;9:1031-1038
At what point does life begin?
I think the author is correct that using the ability to feel pain is poor way to determine if what you are doing is cruel and unusual.
The ability to feel pain is obviously debatable and has nothing to do with whether or not someone is alive. If someone is in a coma or knocked unconscious we wouldn’t be okay with someone killing that person just because they couldn’t feel pain.
By your standard — “At what point does life begin?” extrapolated to “if it’s alive you can’t kill it” — you could never remove a tumor or even eat. What you don’t realize is that your idea worships humans and prioritizes them above all other life. THAT is immoral, not abortions.
Hi Jeff,
Yes I prioritize human life as having much more value than any other living being. I believe that we are much more valuable than just simply the mass of oxygen and carbon that make us up. It is scary to think that anyone might possibly consider a human’s life to be of equal value as that of a cow or a tree. Is your stance that murdering a human should have no punishment or that eating a cheeseburger should have the same punishment as murdering a human?
It’s truly beyond bizarre that so many people care about what other people do with their bodies. Nobody is forcing anyone to get abortions and nobody is forcing anyone to celebrate abortions, so why does anyone care if a woman has one? There are children in all 50 states awaiting adoption and the planet is already overpopulated, so who cares if women have abortions? Abortion a fetus is one of the most responsible decisions that a woman can make, and it’s one that she should be able to make at any time and get done immediately at any medical clinic. If abortions were easier to get and more common it would be a good thing.
Abortion is a moral issue. Compare a world without unwanted pregnancies and *without* abortion against a world without unwanted pregnancies and *with* abortion. Do you have a preference for one over the other? The people over at shoutyourabortion.com/ don’t.
In a world without unwanted pregnancies you would still need abortions in certain cases – when the mother’s life is in danger or if the fetus is so sick it would die anyway or is already dying. Maybe you remember the Indian woman who died in an Irish hospital. Doctors refused to abort her already dying fetus and she died after several days of agony fo a sepsis. They refused just because the fetus still had a heartbeat but everybody agreed that the fetus had no chance of survival (17 weeks gestation).
Yes, abortion is a moral issue but it should only result in the question if YOU want an abortion or not, not if YOU want to prevent anyone else from getting one. And it certainly shouldn’t be a woman’s death warrant to not be able to get one.
These worlds are philosophical ideals. Surely you accept that 10,000 years of medical advancement can eliminate the need for abortion in all cases. If we abandon the ideal of a world without unwanted pregnancy and without abortion, however, will the need for abortion disappear with time? Or will we accept it as a legitimate moral decision for the remainder of history? If we did accept its morality, then how will that shape other moral decisions going into the future? These are important questions as abortion proponents look jealously at the successful “coming out of the closet” tactics of gay rights proponents (see http://shoutyourabortion.com/). Wildly different futures hinge on my ideal versus that of the “shout your abortion” people. Anecdotal evidence won’t distract me from the prize.
To your second paragraph, I assert once more that the morality of a society that accepts abortions will proceed very differently from that of a society that rejects it. I have every right to shape the morality of my society. I’m confused by “the question.” If you’re speaking of the right of society to leverage government in coercing a woman away from an abortion, then I don’t disagree with you completely. An undisputable purpose of government is protecting the natural rights of individuals, both the mother’s and eventually the child’s. Your anecdote is a clear example where an abortion should be admitted. Abortion proponents, however, seem to frequently devalue the child’s natural rights. This is a sad irony: Roe v Wade is based on the 14th Amendment, the amendment that freed the slaves. Many abortion proponents would happily dismiss a one-week-to-term child as the mother’s property, extending zero rights to the child.
More controversially, if your “question” spoke to society’s right to coerce a woman away from abortion through social pressures and other legal means, then I totally disagree. Society at large may or may not decide that such coercion is bad manners, but I reserve the right to morally judge and act within the law on that judgment.
What these laws and many posters fail to recognize is that is is often not a black and white situation. While I lean more toward the viewpoint of abortion as murder, at least past the point where it has a heartbeat and is recognizably human, because that is what it is, there are clearly situations where either the baby or mother’s life would be threatened and where an abortion may be the more humane thing to do. How anyone could take the killing of a baby lightly is beyond me, and the circumstances should warrant the act.
The better thing really is to push hard with education and access to birth control to help women avoid getting pregnant with unwanted babies in the first place.
I suppose such logic will set both the left and the right ablaze. ;)
There’s no possibility of a world without unwanted human pregnancies. No birth control is 100% effective, and because our instincts tell us to have sex regularly, people will have a lot of sex from which they do not want babies. Therefore, abortion is a necessary part of modern human life.
This is a disappointingly shallow response. Medical researchers should strive to find simple and 100% effective birth control because, in part, it would rid the world of many abortions, and that would make the world a better place than it is today. I worry that movements like http://shoutyourabortion.com will stall ending abortion as a social good.
My response was totally on point. Yours, on the other hand, was nothing but name-calling and childish fantasy. Medical researchers should also strive to make everyone live forever, wouldn’t that be nice? Sheesh, grow up and get a grip on reality.
Yes, living forever is objectively good (to those of us who don’t see humankind as a pestilence on the Earth). Pursuing that goal to the exclusion of eliminating abortion, however, is not objectively good. I dissent.
Why do people care if parents molest and kill their children? Paterfamilias is a bit out of fashion as an idea, no?
Tim Popham, one might come to the conclusion that a fetus (it’s not a child) might have some rights, but they can never trump the rights of the woman carrying the fetus. Otherwise you would take rights from a grown, born human being with personhood and transfer those rights to a fetus that’s not born and doesn’t have personhood. Or can we force you to give up your kidney or some of your blood to save other lives? Of course not.
I’m not quite certain how generally you’re speaking here. Given a specific case where the child’s survival imperiles the mother’s life, then I’m somewhat sympathetic to your position. Ethically speaking, I would consider the expected values of lifespan, but the calculus would also attach quite a bit of value to the woman’s enrichment of other children and the child’s prospects without a mother. For instance, consider the case:
– 30 year old mother has 30% chance of survival without an abortion,
– Mother’s expected age of death after the abortion is 80 years,
– Baby has 80% chance of survival without an abortion,
– Surviving baby has an expected lifespan of 80 years, and
– The mother’s survival is expected to increase the lifespan of two other children by 10 years.
Taking the maximum amount of life as the most ethical way to proceed, the abortion case then yields (80-30) + 2(10) = 70 years, while the non-abortion case yields 0.30(80-30) + 0.80(80) = 15 + 54 = 69 years. Under this naive schema, this particular abortion is ethical. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve neglected subjective quality-of-life issues (the mother’s and the child’s), etc. that deserve consideration, but this schema seems perfectly reasonable to me if we’re talking about a child that is one week away from term. What it looks like at 30 weeks, 40 weeks, etc. is an interesting question that I don’t mind further exploring if you want.
If you’re talking about the more general case where the child’s survival doesn’t imperile the mother’s life, then your argument is fallacious. In this case, the mother’s natural rights and the child’s natural rights are not mutually exclusive. I suppose our concepts of “natural rights” could misalign sufficiently to grant you a point, but I won’t grant it until I’ve had a chance to push back on your concept of natural rights. The obvious distinction between abortion and forcibly taking your kidney or blood is that the recipient of the kidney or blood doesn’t need them because of your negligence. If somebody needs a kidney or blood because of your negligence, then I am somewhat sympathetic. If somebody needs a heart because of your negligence, then I am still somewhat sympathetic.
Whoops. 0.80(80) is 64, not 54, so the non-abortion case yields 15+64=79, making the particular abortion unethical.
I am disgusted by your article but not surprised. Too many women have bought into the feminist party line. I don’t understand for the life of me why you hate children especially the most vulnerable. Please don’t send me anymore of this filth. I don’t want to see it in my inbox or on my homepage
Fetal pain?
Fetal abnormality?
Fetal viability?
The very language that we use governs the ways in which we can weigh an issue. In this instance, the topics of “innate dignity” and “sovereign integrity” will never enter the discussion when weighing the rights of the unborn, yet they are amply present when asserting the assumed rights of the mother. The ongoing debate over fetal viability and/or fetal pain has been meticulously constructed to speak of the unborn in static terms (e.g. “At twenty weeks, the fetus is incapable of surviving outside the mother’s womb). Yet advances in in scientific technology have predictably challenged such specious claims. Thus it has become increasingly necessary to construct another standard (fetal pain) that is less prone to the erosion in time.
So, now that we are on the topic of fetal pain, let’s weigh its broader implications. If pain is the sole factor by which we determine the point at which the unborn should not be murdered, then why not apply the same metric to seniors as well. There are drugs available that are capable of complexly shutting down consciousness in a way that would allow for the painless execution of non-productive seniors; think of the cost savings alone! Then there are those who are diagnosed with a terminal illness (A HUGE drain on tax dollars). The severely handicapped (emotional and physical) are also a “bunch of useless eaters.” And let’s not forget those who have been imprisoned for life. The cost-saving potential of such rationale can only be made publicly palatable via the sanitization of language however. Thus I suggest that we frame this modest proposal in finite terms by exclusively focusing on the “quality of life” of those left behind.
I’m sympathetic to your argument, but children are a burden that constrains a woman’s liberty. Not only child raising, but the state provides many legal tools for fathers to interfere with mothers over children. Further, having children, especially the first child, is a huge opportunity cost to women. I’ll have a moral crisis if somebody constructs a persuasive case for restraining abortion before the mother can reasonably be expected to discover her pregnancy.
In response to your modest proposal, the various groups that you cite unify under a common theme: These people used to be a burden to small groups of people, but the state has distributed the burden that they pose across the whole of society. Welfare is an example that tries to mitigate the burden of children, but I claim it’s a failure (because it disrupts the institutional memory that successful families must maintain).
The term “unborn” is utter bullshit, so your entire premise is also.
Stop taking the human element out of it, we can call it a fetus all day and we don’t think twice about tearing it to pieces and out of the mother. But think of it as more of a baby and you might actually see what wrong with it. If you’re old enough to have sex and make the choice to have sex you’re old enough to make the choice to put the baby up for adoption. Abortion shouldn’t be thought of as just another birth control option which is what it has become. Who are we to pick what unborn baby lives and which one dies. Where does it stop for you all? Where should abortion become illegal? Up to the actual birth? I don’t want to argue but let’s start putting the human element back in the conversation, it is a human baby growing and developing and learning, not just a group of cells formed together in the shape of a human.
Getting past the slogans of the PC-authoritarians is near impossible. I’ve had a bit of success with the question, “Is a world without unwanted pregnancies and *without* abortion preferable to a world without unwanted pregnancies and *with* abortion?” It’s depressing how many won’t even grant a “yes” to this question.
A fetus is part of a woman’s body and it’s her choice whether to carry it to term or to abort it. It’s none of your damn business whether people have abortions; no one is forcing you to have one.
Furthermore, overpopulation is a far bigger problem than any issues about whether a fetus should be carried to term for adoption. Your priorities are screwed up if you think fetuses are more important than the health of the Earth, than its ecosystems, or than its other species, all of which are being destroyed by human overpopulation.
If overpopulation is such a problem, then why don’t you kill yourself? If the health of the Earth is supremely important, then you have a duty to kill yourself. No?
Ah, the cry of the anti-environmental asshole. Killing people doesn’t solve overpopulation, because people will breed even more to make up for the dead. Only lowering birth rates is an effective and moral solution to this ultimate problem. Too bad your parents didn’t take advantage of it.
I’ve never heard the rallying cry at our meetings. I’ll offer it up next week, but I’m skeptical. It seems more fitting for the anti-environmentalists.
Do you believe that there exist people who look at population growth statistics for guidance on whether to procreate? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Do you have any evidence to cite?
As far as the “ultimate problem” goes, have you considered free, voluntary sterilizations? You could even promote them with monetary incentives. Or you could go all super-villain, and develop a sterilization drug to sneak into the water supply.
Finally, I’ll agree in retrospect that my parents should have aborted me, but at the time I was dead set against it. I would kill myself now, but I was perusing some statistics the other day, and I feel that America’s population isn’t growing nearly fast enough.
It never ceases to totally disgust me how people obsess on humans while not having any respect or love for the Earth and ALL SPECIES that live here. Considering that human overpopulation is the biggest problem on our planet, we should definitely take the human element out of it. On top of the fact that a fetus is part of a woman’s body — it is NOT A PERSON — to do with as she chooses.
You realize that Roe v Wade is based on the 14th Amendment, right? The amendment that ended slavery? At 8 months and 3 weeks, is the “fetus” still the woman’s property?
Part of a woman’s body until born, with all benefit of the doubt in that direction.
It’s truly sad that the simple idea of not murdering innocent unborn babies (under any circumstance) isn’t enough. Most people have thrown morality out the window.
There’s NO SUCH THING as an unborn baby; it’s called a fetus. This false term is just a propaganda tool used by anti-choice assholes.
Welcome to the Nanny State, Republican Edition, where adults–especially women–aren’t to be trusted with making their own decisions, and must seek knowledge, guidance and wisdom from an understanding and concerned government.
This is happening all over, of course. In one typical example of this new-found conservative compassion, an Iowa state legislator introduced a bill recently that would allow a woman who claims to have suffered distress from terminating her pregnancy to sue her doctor at any time during her life. That sounds reasonable, and the bill was laden with all manner of talk about the supposed ravages of abortion and the supposed cumulative effect of abortion-related stress on the woman (both of which have been debunked by countless studies-look them up yourself) but, it’s simply unnecessary as patients already have the right to sue for medical reasons, so that excuse doesn’t fly.
It’s more than a little ironic that Republicans are out front leading the charge for more medical litigation, litigation that has led and will lead to more regulations and government interference. These two traditional Republican pet peeves are evidently perfectly acceptable provided the regulations are Republican regulations and the interference is Republican government interference.
But, those little ironies are nearly impossible to avoid when you’re lying about your real motives; when you’re being disingenuous about your true intentions. In these cases, those intentions are to keep certain targeted American citizens–women, over half the country–from exercising their constitutional rights.
I’d be interested in hearing the stories of women who have been forced by shame, poverty, legislation or whatever, to carry a rapist’s fetus to term. I can’t imagine the psychic and emotional damage this would cause, particularly if the rapist is a relative. That Republicans–so ostentatiously concerned about the sanctity of human life–would force a woman to go through this reveals their dark core values and their breathtakingly archaic and punitive motives, which are rooted far more in power and control than in any genuine concern for women.
When are you leftists going to understand that government that forces healthcare can also withdraw it? Governments going after citizens for being conservative can also go after citizens for being liberals. I’m sick and tired of you leftist elite liberals not understanding the concept of “limited government “! The founders knew the tyranny of an out of control federal government so they created separation of powers to keep a check on our leaders.
Because of obomos lawless actions we are all suffering: you because the government made promises they can’t keep while conservatives were continually vilified. Time to wake up and support limited government this way you, me get to determine for ourselves how we want to live and not be dictated to by government.
Yes, because nothing screams limited government more than forcing women and doctors to abide by a regulation that allows no room for case by case assessment of the validity for choosing termination of a pregnancy.
Do you even listen to the words that come out of your mouth? Ask a libertarian what they think about Republican abortion policy, they will laugh at your “small government” hypocricy.
I like the example in the article of a woman and doctor having to delay life saving cancer treatments to ensure she carefully considers the psychological and medical harm of an abortion, which has not been proven by ANY actual peer reviewed evidence.
If we remove religious dogma from the law, which is explicitly prohibited in the constitution, there must be present, a fundamental misunderstanding of science, reason, and empathy, added in with a healthy dose of mental acrobatics required to support abortion restrictions. Current and past Republican abortion legislation was used in my graduate level biomedical ethics course as an example of legislative overreach into the world of medicine. It’s not every day we have to tell conservatives to reign in their government’s reach.
Republicans say, “just trust us, we know science and medicine more than scientists and doctors. When scientists and doctors tell us our abortion and global warming policies are factually false, just remember, the media, doctors, scientists, have a liberal bias… Trust us. ”
Please, let’s move our whole country in the direction of great states like Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. These states are showing that their conservative policy agenda brings great prosperity, and attracts the nations brightest scholars, and ingenuitive thinkers. The liberal heathens in states like California, Massachusetts, Maryland, and New York are being propped up by these Great, God fearing bastions of society. /s
“Limited government” doesn’t mean “no government.” The limited government of all conservatives (and the Constitution) universally accepts the role of government in protecting natural rights. The abortion issue pits the natural rights of a woman against those of her child. To conservatives (and the Constitution), abortion fits squarely in the sphere of government concerns.
The Constitution does not remove religious dogma from the law. The Constitution removes from law all religious dogmas that interfere with natural rights. The SCOTUS has not and will not psychoanalyze the religious versus secular motives behind lawmaker decisions–that’s a privilege reserved for voters.
Attributing the abortion positioning of Christians to religious dogma is misguided. See http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/bible.shtml for a quick summary of the Bible’s ambivalence and support for abortion. Christians are exercising their personal moral beliefs on the issue
The SCOTUS has constrained anti-abortion states to policies that their citizens reject. Anti-abortion Republicans are representing their constituents by any and all means possible under the SCOTUS’s constraints. I would expect no less of my representatives.
Ohh Noooooes! They’re rounding up white women- and what next- the same gulags those jaded opinions built for everybody else???
http://www.newser.com/story/237238/woman-fired-investigated-for-trump-assassination-tweet.html
Where’s my free speech?? Ain’t I white??
Yeah, torture schmorture. I mean- the prisons were built to house men, and those institutions are by definition punitive, and torturous.
It might be possible that the world is sick of this argument- and sees their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers abused in ways that make each American woman’s choices seem trite.
Russia, for one, isn’t having any more of it.
http://www.newser.com/story/237215/russia-looks-to-decriminalize-domestic-violence.html
And Russia also isn’t such a moral crusader when it comes to women and prostitution, either.
This odd religious/cultural model of American women using their bodies as sperm traps in order to keep the money in the bank and men in the fields, or in prison is probably out dated.
Junk science? These are human babies you are talking about…how do you even sleep at night? What if that ultrasound gets mom to change her mind and keep her baby? Thats the real problem. Poor babies dont even have a chance.
A fetus is not a baby. Go back to school.
Jennnifer-
Are you one of those who actually believes that the ‘waves’ of accidental babies that “just happened” during the “waves” of international feminism, and single mother era’s of the last forty years were all accidental miracles?
OOooops! I forgot/missed my birth control; the pill failed/the condom broke/ most women are generally tooo spineless to excercise their ‘right’ of abortion/ and anyways, it’s ALWAYS the guys fault!
Should kept his zipper up!
(But American women willfully raised cannon fodder and bodies to fill the privatized gulags no matter what political or religious stripe they wore.)
OOooops! “It’s NEVER HER FAULT”
And yet, forcing a woman to term for an unwanted pregnancy and forcing her to give up a significant part of her life for a child she did not want or was not ready for is TORTURE. So these genius crafty creatures from the bowels of the caintucky legislature are thusly willingly with malice and aforethought inflicting a life of torture upon such women and in so doing violating her rights for her life. And at the same time disavowing her defence of a child who would otherwise also suffer a tortuous life with a father who shouldnt be according the best judgement of the operating general partner. I guess they didnt think that contract law matters either.
Oh no! IT’S TORTURE everyone! It’s TORTURE to force a woman to carry a child she accepted the risk of bearing when she did the dirty deed!
Oh wait, torture is less morally reprehensible than murder, which abortion is.
Listen girl, keep your legs closed and you won’t have to think about these issues. Of course your rebuttal will be about rape and incest born children (because all liberal’s brains are in the gutter XD). Let me preempt those arguments; punish the perpetrator, not the victim. There are two victims when a woman is raped, the woman and the baby. If the woman doesn’t have it in her heart to care for the child, it should be given to an orphanage or church. We could even bring back the workhouses for children who are unwanted.
Either way, I don’t think even the most ardent defenders of baby-murder (what I call abortion) would argue against the fact that murder > rape. By all means give the rapist the death sentence, but don’t take the life of an innocent baby away from society.
It doesn’t matter what you call it. Legally, and ethically, it is not murder to terminate a non viable pre human. By your logic, wearing a condom is murder because my sperm all represent babies.
You can argue conception is the beginning of life but unfortunately your argument is not supported by the medical, legal, or general community of Americans.
Most importantly, forcing a woman to carry a fetus to term when doctors conclude that the risk of pregnancy is enough to abort (even if partially viability could be argued) is an outdated, invasive, and religiously motivated mindset only remaining in great nations of the Middle East or countries that still allow the orthodoxy to dictate law.
Of course this should be a fucking law. You idiots actually go around justifying your promiscuous lives and egregious abortions. SAD! Not only can a fetus feel pain, they can hear what goes on in the womb! That’s why children in republican controlled states do better on average on nationwide testing than liberal states, MUST BE THE JAY-Z! It’s not only the fetus either, it’s the whole zygote. Matter of fact, after reading a couple recent scientific studies, it might be the whole ovum!
Imagine that, you’re walking around as a 13 year old girl, listening to hip hop and rap and RnB, and BAM! You’re pregnant! Now you get to give birth to a potentially retarded baby. Maybe you should have gone to church where they teach little girls to repress themselves and save themselves for a good mate.
I don’t think this comment will actually make it on to this liberal rag due to a heavy dose of the truth, but maybe the moderator or sysadmin will read it and turn their backs on their career based on black magic.
Jordan, above:
Something tells me that Ms. Smith is not using the masculine noun to include both genders, as was common practice in English for a long time. Sigh. ;^(
Though the fight to preserve access to abortion continues, I think it’s important to remember how successful the enemies of choice have been and are.
As of 2014, the last year for which I know reliable statistics exist, 90% of US counties had no clinics providing abortion services (this is a state-info page, but the top-level material is a national overview).
Without repealing Roe (their ultimate goal), the anti-choice forces have been enormously successful in making access more difficult and more expensive for women across the US.
Easy to check. Jordan Smith was accurate on this point, the committee was and is composed of 14 men.
The Kentucky senate has 4 women out of 38, or 11% (in the average state’s senate it’s 22%). In the Kentucky Senate, a few other committees are all-male though most aren’t. No women in overall Senate leadership, though the two Republican women chair committees. The two Republican women voted for the fetal pain bill that the Intercept discussed.
http://www.lrc.ky.gov/committee/standing.htm
http://www.lrc.ky.gov/Committee/standing/V,MA&PP%28S%29/members.htm
http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/women-state-legislature-2017
http://www.lrc.ky.gov/record/17RS/SB5/vote_history.pdf
http://www.lrc.ky.gov/senate/senmembers.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20160605150444/http://www.lrc.ky.gov/Committee/standing/V,MA&PP%28S%29/members.htm
VIP is not a legal issue….. it is a moral issue.
AND, this is NOT “junk science”.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/845410#vp_2
And you have zero right making your precieved morality judgments law. If you don’t believe in abortions don’t be part of one. To tell others they cannot based on your mythical beliefs is ridiculous.
I know you’re only in sociology 101 on the path to your liberal arts degree, but hear me out: Laws are just codified norms.
Let me rephrase that for you in middle school English for your brain: Laws are exactly perceived morality judgments. What the majority thinks is moral, is. That’s that. You can’t argue against it, the only thing you can do is pop out more atheist babies so you can indoctrinate them into believing your brand of mental poison. Thankfully you liberals will continue to have illegal abortions even after we outlaw it, so that terrifying version of the future will never happen, whew.
Well, the latest poll shows that about 70% of Americans support a woman’s right to have an abortion, meaning that the large majority doesn’t think that abortions are immoral. Hope that doesn’t make your minuscule brain explode.
Hey Jeff, I loved that little ad hominem twist at the end of your comment there. I can’t help but notice that you’re posting a bunch of comments about this article, and with a considerable bias. Now, I’m not one to call out a person for “shilling” (after all, we are all shilling for our own side) but I also make a point of not posting like it’s my day job.
As for your point about 70% of America: I’m sure you like comics right? Big Captain America fan? Here’s a good one from him, “Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right.
This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — “No, YOU move.”
As I’m sure you are realizing, I believe that by standing up for the future children of our society I am standing for what’s Right. And what’s Right does not always coincide with the whims of society, otherwise life would be easy and there would be no disagreements.
Even with my minuscule brain (that may have exploded after your brilliant riposte to my comment) I can tell that you perceive yourself to be the one standing on the side of righteousness. There is nothing I can say to a man of blind faith. You do what makes you feel good and free and I will do the same. And what makes me feel good and free is ensuring every child conceived has a shot at enjoying the splendor this world has for them, wanted or unwanted.
God have mercy on your soul Jeff D.
You personally attacked Densai with an irrelevant comment, so I returned the favor. You got what you deserved.
Nice try with the bait & switch, but FAIL! You said that “[w]hat the majority thinks is moral, is” and I responded that a large majority thinks abortion is moral. And no, I don’t like children’s comics, only adult comics aka graphic novels. Never read Captain America, sounds like infantile fascist crap.
Finally, there is no god, at least not as you imagine it.
I see you’re taking lessons from Trump and Spicer. I’m glad you liberals are joining the alt-right in the post facts society, it will be easier for the rational conservatives like me to take power back once you’ve exhausted yourselves fighting over useless shit like global warming or social justice.
The quote stems from Samuel Clemens, or as you probably know him, Mark Twain. But it was featured in a comic book, something I figured you were more familiar with. I can understand why you would stick to graphic novels though, books without pictures are tough! I’ll bet you think Alan Moore is a genius. Boys like you should keep playing at computer games and debating Wonder Woman vs Superman or jacking it to your hentai. Leave the real work to us men.
Don’t worry, my argument isn’t with you, I’ve long contended that abortions should be illegal because all you need to do to not have an unwanted pregnancy is to keep your legs closed or keep your pecker in your pants. And it seems like you’re doing the latter just fine all on your own, champ! ;)
You could apply that same statement to slavery, rape, any activity a moral person judges to be wrong. You haven’t effectively responded to rs’s comment.
I guess, you do not understand MY English!
OK! then… WANNA PLAY SOME HARDBALL?
These paintucky nutjobs are hypocrtical pagans – the kind that God smotes.
Gen:38:9: And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.
10: And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also.
masturbation, premarital intercourse, jit birth control, wet dreams all according to God are worthy of the death penalty. And as the CainTuckey jackasses know, God knows best. But they obviously dont mind burning in hell.
but wait, it gets better –
baby is born.
12 years later little johnny gets suspended from school.
junk science professionals blame it on poor food habits during pregnancy.
mother is charged with the crime of fetus poisoning.
johnny doesnt do well in school after the suspension.
mother gets charged with fetal abuse for having a sit-down job which put abnormal pressure on the fetus’ head.
mother gets pregnant again.
this time mother engages in all manner of non-activity to avoid “jostling” the baby fetus around.
baby born and shows signs of isolation behavior.
mother charged with neglect during pregnancy.
crazy has no limits.
When will Kentucky voters tire of electing the KKK to office?
Insanity has a new place in american politics. The institutions that Reagan closed allowed the inmates, err patients, to fun for public office. However once elected, public officials suffer lots of pain from being criticised for not being perfect. This pain comes to them in torturous dreams with screaming undeveloped fetuses embryos zygots cells and eggs. Clever as these otherwise nutjobs are, and having dismissed science for the easier craft of satanism, they conjure ways to be heroes to mystical figments by scripting fantasies and fairytales rebranded as laws where they can be seen as the white knights – with or without the hoods. Nevertheless, their world is not the real world because they live in the twilight zone.
This Intercept article oversimplifies the scientific research on fetal pain. You link to a single article, which is nice to read, but you overstate what the article says. Unfortunately for people on both sides of the abortion debate, fetal pain is not a well-settled scientific issue. Before I give details on what you left out, here’s an analogy that might be helpful.
Industry lobbyists often try to defend exposing people to substances that are suspected of being toxic. Even when many scientists consider these substances to be probably harmful, the lobbyists will say “There’s no ‘sound science’ proving that these substances harm actual people”. That way, they are able to keep on exposing people to substances that some scientists are concerned about, as long as there is not yet firm scientific proof that the substances are toxic. Fetal pain is kind of like that. There is no proof that fetuses feel pain, or that they don’t. At early points in the pregnancy, it’s pretty widely agreed among scientists that fetuses don’t feel pain, and then as the pregnancy develops further you get more scientists thinking that the fetus is capable of pain, but at no point is there firm scientific proof of anything painful. So, with fetal pain as well as with suspicious chemicals, you have to decide what a fair legal standard should be. Should it be “You can keep on using this chemical/allowing abortions as long as there’s no firm proof of anything bad, even if most scientists have suspicions?” Should we be more precautionary and set a legal limit at the point where 50% of scientists think there’s fetal pain/chemical toxicity? Should it be where 10% of scientists think there may be something bad, or 1%? Or is it better to say that even if the fetus does turn out to feel serious pain, it shouldn’t matter as far as the law is concerned? These are the issues. Of course it’s suspicious if someone gives a different answer on fetal pain than on toxic chemicals (imagine a conservative industry lobbyist who defends a dubious chemical but says that abortion must be banned if there’s even a slight chance of fetal pain). If you want to give a different answer in the two cases, you ought to have a good reason that doesn’t amount to a rationalization.
The one document that the Intercept’s Jordan Smith links to, an article by a British ob-gyns’ association, makes clear that scientists aren’t agreed on fetal pain. In fact, scientists aren’t even agreed on which parts of the brain are essential for pain sensation, such as the cortex or the thalamus. As Lisa pointed out in her comment below, the British article repeatedly says “most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception”, but that’s only most neuroscientists, not all. The reason that the British article gives for thinking that fetuses can’t feel pain before 24 weeks is that the cortex is slow to develop, and that although sensory nerve cells elsewhere in the body are connected to the thalamus, neural connections from the thalamus to the cortex are lacking before 24 weeks. So, the idea is that early fetuses don’t have a cortex that’s plugged into pain circuits, so they don’t feel pain. This is open to doubt, though. Some anti-abortion doctors argue that connections to the cortex develop somewhat earlier than that, but also, some neuroscientists argue that the cortex isn’t necessary for feeling pain at all. The British report you link to mentions that, between 12 and 18 weeks, the fetus starts to develop neural connections from the thalamus to a region of the brain called the subplate. The subplate disappears before the fetus is born, but the nerve cells in the subplate that were connected to the thalamus end up moving to the cortex. So, even at some stages of pregnancy when the cortex is thought to be disconnected from pain circuits, there are nerve cells in the subplate that do conceivably have the right connections to pain circuits and those subplate nerve cells later end up moving to the cortex. Animals like worms and octopuses, which might possibly be capable of pain, don’t even have a cortex. Still, I don’t want to make it sound like there’s strong evidence that fetuses can feel pain without their cortex. The cortex has much more complex nerve circuits, and there is some evidence that children and adults’ sense of pain is localized in the cortex. Scientists know some things about how nerve circuits develop and how they work, but there’s also a lot that we don’t know yet about nerve circuits. And even if we did know more about nerve circuits, the tie between nerve circuits and the potential for painful consciousness remains scientifically elusive. Scientists and philosophers can only speculate for now about what principles link a conscious experience like pain to a physical object like nerve circuits. Because so little is understood, there’s room for scientific debate about when fetuses can feel pain.
One sign of how little we know on this is the way that the British article rejects the idea of fetuses experiencing pain without the cortex. The British doctors write “It has been suggested that subcortical regions can organise responses to noxious stimuli and provide for the pain experience complete within itself but there is no evidence (or rationale) that the subcortical and transient brain regions support mature function.” In other words, some scientists say that fetuses can experience pain using non-cortex parts of the brain, and the British doctors simply reply “Well, there’s no evidence to prove you’re right, and you don’t have a clear theory yet on how that would work”. The problem is that neither side of this debate has good enough evidence or a well-worked-out theory, and in a situation like that it doesn’t make sense to completely dismiss alternative views. It’s worth considering a wider range of possibilities too, like the view that fetal pain exists but is too low a level of pain to be worth worrying about.
There’s a fairly plausible idea that fetuses may be “asleep” during pregnancy, but the British article that this Intercept piece linked to mentions that even if fetuses are asleep, the “noxious stress generated by surgery” might conceivably wake them up. A very respected specialist in neonatal pain, Kanwaljeet Anand, told the New York Times in 2013 that he thinks fetuses are likely to be capable of pain at 18 to 24 weeks, but he adds that in the rare abortions that take place after that point, techniques could be used to prevent fetal pain.
So when the Intercept’s Jordan Smith claims that the idea of fetal pain at 20 weeks is merely “junk science”, she is wrong. In areas where science currently has a limited understanding, there can and should be scientific disagreement, and a variety of hypotheses need to be considered. It’s important to note what the majority of scientists believe, but respect for science also requires acknowledging that, when scientific understanding is limited, there’s a chance that one of the minority views among scientists may be right. To label a minority view as “junk science” when you disagree with it politically is an anti-scientific approach.
Thanks — I wanted to write something like that, but it’s been so long since I read any of the literature about it. So far as I can tell, this is exactly the sort of reasoned, honestly motivated decision making about abortion that represents the (re)emerging moderate center of what was once an excessively religious debate.
fetal pain at 20 weeks?
fetal pain is insane.
JUNK SCIENCE.
pain is not pain until 2 things can occur
1. reaction of the lungs
2. vocalisation
because pain is not pain until you have a soul and can breathe air.
but i am sure there are plenty of turd-brains out there who will next be saying that fetuses also cry.
pain is just a sensation.
pain is not pain until it has “meaning”.
ask an undertaker.
Fetuses aren’t sentient. They have no sense of self and so can’t appreciate any “pain” even if particular neurons are firing. It’s makes as much moral sense to worry about fetal pain is it does amoeba pain. Both are worth less moral worry than cows, elephants, chickens, even ants.
Responding to HippoDave and barabbas:
@barabbas: Most of your reply seems based on the philosophy of operationalism, which says that there is no sense in using a concept (such as pain) except to the extent that there are physical operations (such as checking if someone is crying) that set a clear standard for how far the concept is applicable. Operationalist philosophy might be of some value for, say, someone doing experimental physics (the 20th-century Nobel Prize winner Percy Bridgman was a big supporter of operationalism). But pain is about the least suitable issue to use this kind of philosophy on. I mean, if you or I feel pain while carefully avoiding giving any outward sign of suffering, by your standard there’s no pain because someone else on the outside can’t detect it, but if we’re the person on the inside we can tell the pain is there despite the absence of any outward sign. If you’re underwater where “no one can hear you scream”, your pain still matters. I kind of wonder if you may be influenced by the idea that we don’t have to worry about another’s pain if it’s not readily detectable. But people who think that way are too quick to seek excuses not to care, so they often aren’t good at caring even for a person who clearly is in pain. If another person’s pain matters only when it becomes part of the social realm, then caring about someone in pain becomes just a societal ritual like funerals — and we devolve into warring societies where people in one society don’t care about those outside that society’s network of mutual reinforcement. And often those societies will end up being societies of one. I don’t know whether fetal pain exists — but dealing with the issue requires whatever humans can muster from fallible science, commitments to decency, and resistance to dogmatism.
@HippoDave: Since it’s not possible (as far as I know) to do anything like a mirror test on a fetus, I don’t see why you assume fetuses have “no sense of self”. We just don’t know whether they do or not. I’m not going to just assume things about what fetuses can “appreciate”, since if I did it might end up limiting what I can appreciate. There is so much neurodiversity between an adult and a fetus that it’s hard to see how far ethics applies. Perhaps as knowledge advances, there will some day be a way to settle the issue of fetal pain and whether fetuses have rights, but right now I don’t know.
I totally agree. People who obsess on fetuses don’t give a damn about other life or our planet, let alone women. THEY are the immoral ones, not people who support a woman’s right to abortion.
Thank you Randall Rose for taking the time to write such a well considered response to add thoughts to the article. Appreciate it.
Unless he has first hand fully documented proof one way or the other HE IS A LIAR – A FRAUD – A CHARLATAN – AND A FOOL SEEKING PUBLICITY
If Mr. Trump is serous about restoring our greatness stopping FRAUD by CHARLATANS and FOOLS SEEKING PUBLICITY would be a GREAT START
T R U T H – – J U S T I C E – – The AMERICAN WAY
Does this charlatan have any opinion of what prisoners on death row go through during their executions ???
There is a premise that it’s ok to kill as long as the person being killed can’t feel the pain.
But, if the person can feel the pain, then it would be wrong to kill.
Explains well the opiate pain killer epidemic too.
The letters science mean zip.
J-science; the corrector grabbed that!
Please do not use the phrase science, bc there is no such thing.
When millions of Americans are yearly affected by MentalIllness, a good majority of them women who may not be able to parent. The fetus is not formed. The woman may know something you donot. Daily children die of adult and parental abuse. Many of these women have multiple mentally ill partners who assiste wholeheartedly in the children’s horror and death.
Abortion is about prevention. A fetus is a bucket of bolts.
In some ways the abortion debate has progressed and matured tremendously. We are arguing about whether a fetus feels pain at 20 weeks or 30 — that is a tremendous meeting of the minds compared to debating whether IUDs or partial birth abortions should be accepted. We are nearly to the point where individual reading of the data, personal empathy for fetus or mother, and philosophical value placed on preventing risk of harm vs. avoiding legislation can fully account for the remaining variation, and the issue becomes no longer contentious, but a matter of ordinary legislation.
Except: the Republican love of tricks and their contempt for the poor. Requiring one ultrasound to establish a gestational age of 20 weeks or 30, that is fair enough. Requiring two ultrasounds on two different visits because financially denying a poor woman an abortion is “just life” but denying it to a rich woman would be unreasonable — that’s something else.
The study you cite states there is a “reasonable inference” that fetuses cannot feel pain before 24 weeks gestation. The most you can say is that it is not proven that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks.See e.g., http://www.factcheck.org/2015/05/does-a-fetus-feel-pain-at-20-weeks/)
That does not make the argument of Utah lawmakers “junk science,” but it is also not an honest argument. I am on the fence and just wish we could have honest discussions-not the inflammatory and distorted use of science from both sides.
correction: Kentucky lawmakers.
Lisa, it’s about more conclusive than what you report:
It’s very unlikely that at 20 weeks a fetus perceives pain. Moreover, the article above is correct; the anti-abortion forces have long promoted junk science of all varieties. (I have criticisms of the pro-choice side as well, which also has played a few games with science, but more in the way it uses language and evades some serious moral inquiries.)
Abortion must be legal, at least in the first 20 weeks. A woman’s right to autonomy and to control her own body makes this necessary. Very late (and rare) abortions, however, in which the abortion procedure is intended to ensure a dead baby, as opposed to ending the pregnancy, presents a very different moral inquiry.
A couple of questions and comments, Mona. Why doesn’t a woman’s right to autonomy and control of her own body extend past the 20 week period? Why don’t her rights extend throughout the length of her pregnancy, however long she–and she alone–decides it should be? For that matter, why does a pregnancy change a woman’s rights at any point?
Also, I’m going to take issue with your anecdotal situation in which a pregnant woman’s intention is to “ensure a dead baby,” (putting the word ensure in italics) and not simply, “ending the pregnancy.” Jesus, what a way to put it. Remember, until the fetus passes through the birth canal, it’s still a fetus, not a baby.
Also, what’s the moral inquiry if the woman is seeking to, in your words, ensure a dead baby, if she’s doing so to save her own life? And, what kind of a woman would characterize her decision as a choice to “ensure a dead baby?” Where are you coming up with this stuff today, Mona? The entire point is that women should have the right to control their own bodies, pregnant or not. American adults either have reproductive choice, or they don’t, it’s that simple.
Pro-choice supporters are often accused of playing god, replacing his divine plan with their own by claiming the right to control their own lives. But the radical Christians are who’s really playing god here, giving themselves the authority to place a higher value on a fertilized egg than on the life of an already fully living, breathing, vital human being who could very well already be a mother.
It’s unconscionable that anyone, anywhere has the right to tell an adult woman at any stage of her life what she can and cannot do with her body, the kind of medical care she can seek or what she does with her own life at any time and any period. In my opinion, this has to change.
That’s right Jordan Smith, the notion that anyone other than unaborted and constantly bullied LGBTQRSTs and oppressed minorities feels pain is simply unscientifical (see Lysenko) and it’s meant to undermine everything that’s desirable and correct politically.
The foetuses are generally unwanted growths inside women’s bodies. They are like cancer and they should be treated like cancer. Think about it: about half of them, if not removed, are going to turn into ‘men’ who, unless turned gay, are going to be rapists and members of the oppressive patriarchy.
The world would be a so much better place if the foetuses that grew to become Donald Trump and Putin were hygienically cleansed from their mommy’s tummy.
Can we maybe set a rule that all XY foetuses be aborted by default and leave it as a ‘women’s choice’ for the XXs or the XXXs? And I’m not even mentioning Hitler, Osama, Assad or Billy the Rapist Clinton.
I can see that you’re in pain, but this isn’t the best place to work-out your personal conflict.
That’s not a word. Any more than the notions anti-abortion activists promnote– described above — are “science.”
Either the state coerces and decides a woman must have her body remain pregnant, or she decides. There is no middle ground. As between the state on the one hand, and a woman in consultation with her medical caregivers on the other, the moral choice as to who decides about a woman’s body is obvious.
It’s funny how the SJWs run to ‘the state’ whenever, let’s say, the obvious rights of gay men to coach Boy Scouts are ignored by that organization. Or when the possible grand-grand-grand-grandchildren of sometimes enslaved minorities are not granted sufficient preference over the grand-grand-grand-grand children of those who happen to belong to the ‘race’ of slave owners of the time and East Asians. Obviously, it is the state’s sacred duty to protect the rights of homosexual men or of those who may be the descendants of slaves. By the way, digressing a little, I believe that all of us are close or distant descendants of kings and queens and of slaves so I’m not sure whether I should feel guilt or entitlement.
And, of course, the foetuses feel pain. How do we know? They are in the process of growing a brain and lifeforms developed a nervous system because the ability to detect and react to the outside world was advantageous. It’s funny how the same people who believe that foetuses are not much different from a cancerous growth are firmly opposed to showing undecided pregnant women ultrasound images of the little babies moving and sometimes sucking their proto-thumbs in their tummies.
Seriously, if these things don’t feel pain, maybe once they come out, the human-shaped tissue could be given to the entitled woman to personally squeeze-crush it – she can wear latex gloves – until it stops so indecently and selfishly pulsating? Or perhaps give it to her, alcohol or formaldehyde-preserved in a nicely sealed bottle, as a pretty remembrance.
That string of non sequiturs, ad hominems, red herrings, misdirection and other logical fallacies does not constitute a rebuttal to a thing I wrote.
All of human history is replete with women managing unwanted pregnancies. By: abortion, infanticide, exposure, or giving the newborns to orphanages where — in the Middle Ages thought the 19th century — they almost certainly died. Women always have had to control their reproduction; this is not some modern “SJW” phenomenon.
You are very ignorant, of both science and history, and about human nature. As well as being an extremely poor debater who wouldn’t appear to recognize his use of a fallacy if it first bit him in the ass.
You want a good example of a ‘non sequitur’? Here’s one:
All of human history is replete with women managing unwanted pregnancies.
The above is as good an argument to keep killing little babies as stating, correctly, that all of human history is replete with men slaughtering each other by millions in order to support more wars of conquest and subjugation.
Seriously, claiming that something was ‘right’ because it was done in the past is NOT how you want to defend your views, whatever they may be. Killing babies was always wrong, whether it was done legally or illegally and all wars of conquest, no exception, were exercises in mass murder. Both are wrong, both are likely to continue because killing appears to be part of our nature but I am not going to celebrate or justify either.
As I thought, you do not know what a non sequitur is. You deploy them promiscuously — along with a parade of other fallacies (and the use of words that do not exist). Because you do not know what they are, or know how to argue per the rules of logic, you ignorantly “see” fallacies” in what others write.
Simply asserting “X was always wrong” is just that, an assertion. You are teeming with emotion-driven arguments, largely unaccompanied by sound science or reasoning.
Such “thinking” is very typical of Trump, as well as his supporters like you.
As I thought, you don’t know nothing about nothing :)
Sorry, but grandiose pomposity doesn’t work all the time or with everybody. And, no, I am not being generalistic when I state this. I am talking specifically about your sorry attempts at supporting your ‘views’ which happen to be wrong by throwing these ridiculous pronouncements, and more of them with each subsequent iteration and hoping that your ‘opponent’ gives up, eventually.
Well… I am not your ‘opponent’, I am simply stating that ending other people’s lives is wrong. And you can smear as much lipstick on your argument as you can possibly afford but that won’t move you to the right side. Unless you admit that you were wrong and embrace the right.
It’s not hard, believe me. I can be persuaded to change my views and I did change my views more than once – think of Socrates and of what it was that made him such a wise person. One good example is my views on abortions. I used to be on ‘your’ side for a while and I stayed there until a very real experience showed me that I was wrong.
As a separate comment, not to distract from the important debate over the killing or ‘destruction’ of foetuses, I obviously used unscientifical as a tribute to Lou Reed my love for you is chemical (I’m surprised you didn’t catch that) and, at the same time, alluding to Hillary’s completely dumb ‘explanation’ of her deplorables statement where she claimed that she was being… GENERALISITC which instantly reminded me of her husband’s there IS no sexual relation with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.
Clinton: Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic
Now you simply beclown yourself.
Lou Reed is where I draw the red line. Don’t you dare cross it.