Posted on 06/04/2015 2:54:34 AM PDT by Morgana
The lead Senate sponsor of the pro-life bill that bans abortions from after 20-weeks of pregnancy up to the day of birth will introduce the legislation next week. Last month, the House of Representatives voted 242-184 for the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is the lead sponsor of the pro-life measure in the Senate, has announced that he will introduce the measure next week. In a new letter to members of the Senate, released to LifeNews.com, the National Right to Life Committee is urging members of the Senate to sign on to the legislation as cosponsors.
“The operative language of the proposal that Senator Graham intends to introduce is the same as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act as approved by the House of Representatives on May 13 (H.R. 36, as revised by the Franks Substitute Amendment),” NRLC says in its letter. “Like earlier versions of the legislation, the House-passed bill extends general protection to unborn children who are at least 20 weeks beyond fertilization (which is equivalent to 22 weeks of pregnancy — about the start of the sixth month).”
National Right to Life says there is an abundance of scientific evidence showing unborn babies feel pain in the latter stages of pregnancy and the pro-life group says the Senate ha an obligation to protect them from excruciating abortions.
“There is abundant evidence – summarized in the findings of the bill – that by this point in development (and probably earlier), the unborn child has the capacity to experience excruciating pain during typical abortion procedures,” the group said. “The bill also creates specific requirements for the protection of infants who are born alive during these late abortions.”
“It is now commonplace to read about evidence that, by 20 weeks fetal age and even earlier, an unborn child responds to many forms of stimuli, including music and the mother’s voice. Claims that the same child is nevertheless insensible to the violence done to her body during an abortion should engender strong skepticism. Abortions at this stage are performed using a variety of techniques, but most often by a method in which the unborn child’s arms and legs are twisted off by brute manual force, using a long stainless steel clamping tool,” NRLC adds.
National Right to Life says these late-term abortions after 20 weeks are not rare, as abortion advocates claim, adding that at least 275 facilities offer abortions past 20 weeks fetal age.
The pro-life group also says polling data indicates a strong majority of Americans support the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
“In a nationwide poll of 1,623 registered voters in November 2014, The Quinnipiac University Poll found that 60% would support a law such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks, while only 33% opposed such legislation. Women voters split 59-35% in support of such a law, while independent voters supported it by 56-36%,” it said.
Should the Senate approve the bill, President Barack Obama has issued a veto threat. But pro-life groups hope to use the measure as an election tool in 2016 in an attempt to wrest control of the White House and approve a pro-life president who will sign it into law.
During the hearing on the last bill, former abortion practitioner Anthony Levatino told members of the committee the gruesome details of his former abortion practice and how he became pro-life following the tragic automobile accident of his child.
Another bombshell dropped during the hearing came from Dr. Maureen Condic, who is Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She testified that the unborn child is capable of reacting to pain as early as 8-10 weeks. This is when most abortions in America take place.
The vast majority of Americans are still very uncomfortable with abortion, according to a January Marist University poll. The survey finds support for abortion restrictions among both “pro-life” and “pro-choice” supporters. Despite the strong support, President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the pro-life bill.
According to the national survey, 84% of Americans want significant restrictions on abortion, and would limit abortions to, at most, the first three months of pregnancy. This includes almost 7 in 10 (69 percent) who identify themselves as “pro-choice” who support such abortion limits and oppose late-term abortions.
The same percentage (84 percent) also says that laws can protect both the well-being of a woman and the life of the unborn. In addition, by more than 20 points (60 percent to 38 percent), Americans say abortion is morally wrong.
Other national polls also show strong support nationwide for the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and stopping late-term abortions.
A poll conducted for the liberal Huffington Post find Americans support the ban on late-term abortions starting at 20-weeks of pregnancy by almost a 2-1 margin.
A national poll by The Polling Company found that, after being informed that there is scientific evidence that unborn children are capable of feeling pain at least by 20 weeks, 64% would support a law banning abortion after 20 weeks, unless the mother’s life was in danger. Only 30% said they would oppose such a law.
A November 2014 poll from Quinnipiac found that 60 percent of Americans support legislation limiting abortions after 20 weeks, including 56 percent of Independents and 46 percent of Democrats.
The bill relies on the science of fetal pain to establish a Constitutional reason for Congress to ban abortions late in pregnancy. The science behind the concept of fetal pain is fully established and Dr. Steven Zielinski, an internal medicine physician from Oregon, is one of the leading researchers into it. He first published reports in the 1980s to validate research showing evidence for it.
He has testified before Congress that an unborn child could feel pain at “eight-and-a-half weeks and possibly earlier” and that a baby before birth “under the right circumstances, is capable of crying.”
He and his colleagues Dr. Vincent J. Collins and Thomas J. Marzen were the top researchers to point to fetal pain decades ago. Collins, before his death, was Professor of Anesthesiology at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois and author of Principles of Anesthesiology, one of the leading medical texts on the control of pain.
“The functioning neurological structures necessary to suffer pain are developed early in a child’s development in the womb,” they wrote.
“Functioning neurological structures necessary for pain sensation are in place as early as 8 weeks, but certainly by 13 1/2 weeks of gestation. Sensory nerves, including nociceptors, reach the skin of the fetus before the 9th week of gestation. The first detectable brain activity occurs in the thalamus between the 8th and 10th weeks. The movement of electrical impulses through the neural fibers and spinal column takes place between 8 and 9 weeks gestation. By 13 1/2 weeks, the entire sensory nervous system functions as a whole in all parts of the body,” they continued.
With Zielinski and his colleagues the first to provide the scientific basis for the concept of fetal pain, Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand has provided further research to substantiate their work.
One leading expert in the field of fetal pain, Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand at the University of Tennessee, stated in his expert report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, “It is my opinion that the human fetus possesses the ability to experience pain from 20 weeks of gestation, if not earlier, and the pain perceived by a fetus is possibly more intense than that perceived by term newborns or older children.”
“The neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies,” explains Steven Calvin, M.D., perinatologist, chair of the Program in Human Rights Medicine, University of Minnesota, where he teaches obstetrics.
Dr. Colleen A. Malloy, Assistant Professor, Division of Neonatology at Northwestern University in her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2012 said, “[w]hen we speak of infants at 22 weeks LMP [Note: this is 20 weeks post fertilization], for example, we no longer have to rely solely on inferences or ultrasound imagery, because such premature patients are kicking, moving, reacting, and developing right before our eyes in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.”
“In today’s medical arena, we resuscitate patients at this age and are able to witness their ex-utero growth and development. Medical advancement and technology have enabled us to improve our ability to care for these infants…In fact, standard of care for neonatal intensive care units requires attention to and treatment of neonatal pain,” Dr. Malloy testified. She continued, “[t]hus, the difference between fetal and neonatal pain is simply the locale in which the pain occurs. The receiver’s experience of the pain is the same. I could never imagine subjecting my tiny patients to horrific procedures such as those that involve limb detachment or cardiac injection.”
Help me out. Can you provide some text?
I’m not convinced of your all-or-nothing mindset. Things go in a direction. And legislation is for lawbreakers, that is, for humans. In a perfect world, there is no need for legislation at all. It would be immoral. All laws would be immoral.
Life and death and equal protection under the law are intrinsically all or nothing.
Either you're alive or you're dead.
And either all or protected equally, or no one's rights are secure.
Ultimately, you get what you can take and you keep what you can defend.
Babies are helpless and can't defend themselves. That's our job.
It’s obvious that at this point, no one’s rights are secure—they can all be challenged in court—and that’s the practical point of origin.
Your link doesn’t show me how the bill grants explicit permission to murder babies. That’s your rhetoric.
In a perfect world, there is no need for legislation at all. Legislation would be immoral. All laws would be immoral.
You eat an elephant one bite at a time, and the pro-abortion issue is an elephant.
Had Free Republic been around two hundred years ago I suspect we would have seen posts that read something like this:
So you think the Missouri Compromise shouldn’t pass?You eat an elephant one bite at a time, and the slavery issue is an elephant.
We know what eventually happened, the Dred Scott Decision, Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act and other events eventually ended in the bloodiest and most divisive war in American history.
In the end, it became clear that there was ONLY ONE SOLUTION for slavery and that was complete and immediate emancipation of ALL slaves and total abolition of slavery. And the reason for this, though not obvious to many at the time, is that it is inherently immoral for a person to own another person and that such a practice is completely incompatible with a just society. NONE of the libertarian Whig approaches worked because NOTHING could hide how truly evil the institution of slavery was.
If you oppose abortion, you need to ask yourself WHY. Is it because you think it is the "correct" conservative position? Is it because your pastor opposes it? What is the SPECIFIC reason?
Ultimately we each must conclude that the ONLY REASON TO OPPOSE ABORTION is because it is the murder of an innocent human being, one person is allowed to kill another person simply because they want to. If abortion doesn't involve killing a person there is no reason to oppose it; if abortion is simply the act of a woman removing part of HER BODY, we have no more right to tell her not to than we do in telling her how to cut her hair.
No, we oppose abortion because, although the baby is growing within the mother, the baby is a separate and unique person and therefore has the same rights that every other person has.
The Constitution repeatedly and explicitly forbids ANY law that allows the taking of innocent life and that is what the proposed law does. This law says that killing a person is lawful as long as it is done in accordance with an arbitrary timetable. And, just as the goal line was repeatedly moved with slavery, there is nothing to keep this timetable from changing. Why twenty weeks? Why not ten years? This bill is nothing more than a Faustian pact by ravenous wolves claiming to be sheep and it is designed to establish a theocracy of Satan in America.
Thank you, exDemMom.
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It's time for people to face the ugly truth.
Well, They will never pass a bill outlawing abortion. There will never be a civil war over abortion. In the cases of rape, incest, the life of the mother, or the fitness of the child, you lose by a wide margin.
There are many pro-lifers who in the end would be pro-choicers, then there are many pro-choicers who would never abort their child no matter what.
Not all pro-lifers are religious and not all pro-choicers are evil.
There doesn't need to be. Congress simply needs to do it's job and enforce the 14th Amendment.
Read the opinion in Roe v. Wade sometime, it flat out says that abortion is illegal if it is a person being killed.
There will never be a civil war over abortion.
We're getting close to one now, most people are simply unaware of it.
The problems of the deficit and immigration are DIRECT RESULT of killing 60 MILLION people who would be workers, taxpayers and consumers.
In the cases of rape, incest, the life of the mother, or the fitness of the child, you lose by a wide margin.
"Fitness of the child"? What on earth do you mean by that? Are we talking about the fact that the child might eventually go bald or need eyeglasses?
Why should the child of a rapist be executed when it is illegal to execute the rapist?
For what other crimes do you think the child of the criminal should be executed? If, God forbid, YOUR FATHER were to rape a woman, would she have a "right" to kill YOU? And if not, why not?
There are many pro-lifers who in the end would be pro-choicers,
Of course there are, Pro-Life, Inc. has spent forty years proposing an endless stream of laws that endorse killing babies on a schedule or after certain criteria are met. The goal of NRTL is to make abortion "safe and legal and rare" and that's why they propose schedules and demand that the death chambers be sanitary.
Not all pro-lifers are religious
No, but ALL who promote abortion are devoted to the theocracy of Satan.
and not all pro-choicers are evil.
That is an absolute LIE.
There is NOTHING more intrinsically evil than killing a human being and that is what they support.
Really, 60 MILLION INNOCENT AMERICANS are murdered and you don't think men should have a say?
I am 100% pro life, but I will never vote to force a woman into child bearing slavery.
Having a child is "slavery"?
A person is either 100% pro-life or they are pro-death and YOUR position is pro-death.
“Having a child is “slavery”?”
Tell me why a certain someone allows these trolls?
Warning: FR is a 100% pro-life site. You are within one post of a zot.
” “Having a child is “slavery”?”
Yeah....that one epitomizes the Obama rhetoric to a tee!.
Noted.
Apologies. I think deep strategy and I was just trying to convey a seemingly better strategy for what I believed was a quicker and more beneficial approach.
Your deep strategy sucks.
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