Abortion

Until recently, most neonatalogist believed that babies in the womb were mostly immune to feeling pain. 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. Researchers say that 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.

Unborn babies feel pain early, the existence of fetal pain is one of the many discoveries that have come from the intricate and mysterious world of the unborn child. "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 periantologist and chair of the program of Human Rights in Medicine at the University of Minnesota. "The neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies."

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 conclusion is that millions of aborted unborn children have silently suffered 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.

For decades, abortionists and abortion advocates have tried to convince people that physical suffering for unborn children during abortion is a myth. Abortion became legal in the United States before sonograms became prevalent or photos of human life in the womb were readily accessible. Abortion became legal before researchers had taken time to study the issue of fetal pain. However, mounting new scientific evidence is removing any doubt that unborn children do, indeed, feel intense pain.

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