8 weeks from conception
Posted on 01/24/2007 10:29:08 AM PST by Mr. Silverback
Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.
Warning: The following commentary includes graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for children or sensitive readers.
Undoubtedly many of the great evils of our times have been committed because the cries of the victims were not heard—not heard by those who sat by, comfortably ignorant of the horrors around them. In early nineteenth-century England, few citizens had any real understanding that the lump of sugar they dropped in their afternoon tea was made at the high price of human bondage. The screams of men and women branded or whipped on West Indies sugar plantations were not heard in the fashionable parlors of England. Not until, that is, the great Christian statesman William Wilberforce launched his crusade against the slave trade.
Today, some two hundred years later, there are victims whose agony our ears will never hear. These are the unborn victims of abortion.
While the unborn do not have a voice to scream, science tells us that by twenty weeks a child in the womb is capable of feeling pain. Dr. Sunny Anand, director of the Pain Neurobiology Laboratory at Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute, testified before Congress and said: “The pain perceived by a fetus is possibly more intense than that perceived by term newborns or older children . . . the highest density of pain receptors per square inch of skin in human development occurs in utero from twenty to thirty weeks gestation.” Sobering testimony.
To make matters worse, the biological mechanisms that inhibit the experience of pain do not begin to develop until weeks thirty to thirty-two.
Yet ironically, an unborn child has less legal protection from feeling pain than commercial livestock. In a slaughterhouse, a method of slaughter is deemed legally humane only if, as the hundred-year-old law states, “all animals are rendered insensible to pain . . . ” By contrast, D&E abortions, performed as late as twenty-four weeks, involve the dismemberment of the unborn child by a pair of sharp metal forceps. Instillation methods of abortion replace up to one cup of amniotic fluid with concentrated salt solution, which the unborn child inhales as the salt burns his or her skin. The child lives in this condition up to an hour.
These things are uncomfortable to hear and to speak about. That is precisely the point. We should not be comfortable in a society where such things exist and where we have the power to influence change. The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act is scheduled to be re-introduced into this Congress. This legislation would require that women seeking abortions are fully informed of the pain that their unborn baby feels when he or she is aborted twenty weeks or more after fertilization. If that knowledge does not deter the mother in what has come to be reduced to a mere “choice,” she must be offered the opportunity to give the unborn child drugs to ease his or her pain.
Pro-abortion advocates dreadfully fear this legislation. It brings to light the difficult questions they do not want to confront, like why livestock have more rights than an unborn child. Questions like these, like the cries of victims, are hard to forget once they have shaken us from the comfort of our parlor chairs.
Excellent idea. It would also make a hack of a documentary, some young pro-lifer going through Capitol Hill Michael Moore style, asking Congresscritters to read this and respond. He or she would get the door slammed in their face by almost all liberals, and those libs who did read it would be tap dancing like crazy afterward. To make it bi-partisan, the pro-lifer could ask everybody--even the pro-life pols who were mightily disturbed--why tax dollars go to an organization (Planned Parenthood) that commits such acts.
I fail to understand why instead of abortion being as widely available as Slurpees in a 7-11, that abortion be restricted to cases of rape, incest, the mother's life at medical risk from pregnancy, and if a woman decides she doesn't want to be a mother, so be it: she carries the child to 9 months, she is given a general anesthetic, the child is delivered by C-section, the child is never seen by her, and is placed for adoption with loving parents who WANT that child, will CARE for that child, and the biological bearer of that infant never has to see her offspring, she heals up, goes on about her business, secure in the fact that the unwanted child she carried is with a loving home that will raise that child, Lord willing, to adulthood, and everybody (including the child) comes out a winner.
What could be more reasonable than that?
hack=heck
Every person who says we must hold the line on Roe vs. Wade is defending this. Everyone who would fight it if we tried to pass a law restricting abortion to the first trimester is defending this. Every...single...one.
My wife did a neonatal rotation during her studies to become an RN, and she remarked on their sensitivity.
"God have mercy upon us".
...make that "them". I'm not taking the heat for what these liberal monsters do.
Sure as heck would be better than what we've got now.
Are you saying you'd be okay with a law that left abortion legal in the first trimester?
Yep Mr. S, the relevent question to these people is: Why do you even think an animal is more important than a human being or even of equal importance of a human. The idiocy of comparing animals in a slaughter house to a human baby shows the utter stupidty and cruelty and utter disregard for human life many people disply today.
Because somewhere along the line, society began to paint adoption as a worse option than abortion. And let's fact it- the most attactive part of abortion is that you walk in the client, have the procedure, walk out, problem solved. No one has to know about your adulturous affair or that your good girl daughter got knocked up, or about the boyfriend that twice your age. It is simply the easy way out of getting in trouble. Adoption, meanwhile, requires actual sacrifice, and many are unwilling to do so.
BTW, Roe vs. Wade ruled that abortion was only legal in the first trimester and that states could have any restrictions they wanted for the second and third, but Doe vs. Bolton introduced the "health exemption" and blew that to smithereens.
I am debating whether or not to respond to calex59, 'cause I know if I do I am going to put aside my work and not stop for 2 hours.
We now have the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi who voted against a bill last month to lessen the pain felt by the unborn child during an abortion. This is the same Pelosi who want to "help" all the children. What a hypocrite. It is just disgusting what the American people are tolerating from their politicians.
Very, very true.
The abortion issue would disappear if the folks claiming to be Christians would merely acknowledge that abortion kills a being with a human spirit, the thing given by God and God only. But we must know there are millions of cinos and pretend christians populating AMerica ... there's an entire political party nearly filled to the limit with same.
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