REPLY TO A READER RE: PAIN IN THE UNBORN BABY


A reader recently made this comment: "Basically my question is this: how is it possible for you to act so caring for the unborn, which are nothing more than a bundle of living cells, with no feelings nor consciousness that depends on its host body in order to continue to live?"

First of all, the unborn baby is not just a bundle of cells, it is a living, growing human being; it is a human life with a soul; it is the magnificent creation of God. The baby growing in the mother's womb does not belong to the mother or the father-- it is a gift from God. It belongs to God. It is God's child -- created in His own likeness and image.

Secondly, babies in the womb do indeed feel pain. Because they cannot verbalize that pain in words, they are the most vulnerable victims of violence in our society today. They are living in their mother's wombs -- which should be the safest place on earth for them. It should be a warm, comforting, nurturing environment where they feel completely secure. Yet, this is the place where over 45,ooo,ooo babies in the US alone have suffered death in obscenely torturous ways. Unborn babies do feel pain when they are being murdered in the womb.

With the advent of sonograms and live-action ultrasound images, doctors and nurses began to see unborn babies at 20 weeks gestation react physically to outside stimuli such as sound, light and touch.

The sense of touch is so acute that even a single human hair drawn across an unborn child's palm causes the baby to make a fist.

More recently, surgeons entering the womb to perform corrective procedures on tiny unborn children have found that those babies will flinch, jerk and recoil from sharp objects and incisions.

"In instances when a fetal bladder is obstructed and we need to go in and puncture it to drain the bladder, the unborn baby will pull away," explains Dr. Steven Calvin, a practicing perinatologist and chair of the Program in Human Rights in Medicine at the University of Minnesota, where he also teaches obstetrics. "The neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies."

The pain is agonizing. Since medical researchers now widely agree that unborn babies at 20 to 24 weeks gestation experience pain during prenatal surgery, they most certainly feel pain during abortion.

The obvious and horrifying conclusion is that millions of aborted unborn children have silently suffered pain in their final minutes of life.

The most common methods used to abort unborn babies at 20 weeks gestation or more involve sharp-edged instruments to cut, tear and twist the baby's body into pieces, which are extracted from the womb.

In a partial-birth abortion, the unborn baby is delivered feet first, except for the head, which is punctured at the base of the skull with a sharp object. The brains are then suctioned out, killing the child.

Saline instillation is another later-term abortion method in which salt water is injected into the womb through the mother's abdomen. The unborn baby swallows this fluid, is poisoned and dies slowly in a process that sometimes takes 24 hours. The toxic saline solution causes severe burns over the unborn child's entire body.


Medical facts on fetal pain

Medical researchers around the world are acknowledging that the human fetus feels pain much earlier in its development than once thought. Here is proof:

The fetus at 20 weeks gestation "is fully capable of experiencing pain. … Without question, all of this is a dreadfully painful experience for any infant subjected to such a surgical procedure."

— Robert J. White, M.D.,PhD., professor of neurosurgery at Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio, in testimony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, March 21, 1996

— Jean A. Wright, M.D., M.B.A., Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Emory School of Medicine, White Paper: Advances in the Understanding of Fetal Pain, Christian Medical Association

Unborn babies have heightened sensitivities

According to Dr. Paul Ranalli, neurologist at the University of Toronto, unborn babies between 20 and 30 weeks development may actually feel pain more intensely than adults. He says this is a "uniquely vulnerable time, since the pain system is fully established; yet the higher- level pain-modifying system has barely begun to develop."

Given the medical evidence that unborn babies experience pain, compassionate people are viewing abortion more and more as an inhumane and intolerable brutality against defenseless human beings.

Comments

  1. Another method of aborting pregnancies is not even considered abortion by many who practice it. It is generally reserved for babies with anomalies incompatible with life outside the womb. It happens in hospitals that otherwise will not perform abortions, including many Catholic hospitals.
    The procedure is to induce labor prior to viability and when the baby is born, to allow it to die. It is considered by most who support it to be humane to both mother and child. Any anesthesia used is given to the mother during her labor, though there is not usually as much concern about suppressing the fetal respiration after birth. The baby is usually held by mom or another family member until it dies, and baptism is offered.
    It takes real thought to understand what is wrong with this. After all, the baby will die when born, no matter what - so why should the mother have to go through weeks or months more of pregnancy? Why not induce labor as soon as the diagnosis is made? Even ignoring the possibility of a wrong diagnosis, prenatal euthanasia is morally reprehensible. Even if it is done gently and with care, it is still cutting short the gift of life, which in this case is already way too short.

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  2. Excellent post!

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  3. I cannot understand how any thinking person can believe that any human being, born or preborn, can NOT feel pain when being cut or ripped apart without anesthesia. It boggles my mind. When a baby is born premature, regardless of HOW premature, they react to needle sticks! They pull away from the source of pain! Nerves are functioning. Do these people assume that the nerves connect and begin to work only as the baby passes through the vaginal canal on the way out???

    If people would begin to THINK, rather than buy into the word-speak that pro-aborts use, they would begin to see the mistaken rationale in most of the rhetoric used. Products of conception, blob of cells, tissue, etc are all just to dehumanize that pre-born infant so that people DON'T think about what is really happening.

    Babies, born or pre-born, feel pain. Funny, how so many who WANT those babies play music during the pregnancy, talk to the child, etc...while those who do defend abortion... try to pretend it isn't even a baby! ... oh, forgive my rant...

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