A measure proposed in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives this week would require the administering of pain medication to an unborn child before an abortion is performed.
State Representative Tim Bonner (R-Grove City) circulated a memorandum asking other representatives to back his upcoming bill which would instruct abortion doctors to dispense pain relief to a fetus if the organism has gestated for longer than 15 weeks. Bonner suggested his bill would not affect the legality of ending a pregnancy and entreated lawmakers on both sides of the abortion issue to join him in sponsoring the legislation.
The representative mentioned that a number of medical procedures can be performed on a fetus still living in the womb and that, in such instances, doctors typically provide the unborn child with a pain-control substance. No such step is taken, however, in preparation for an abortion.
“There is no reason not to give the fetus the benefit of any question when it can feel pain particularly at a time when the existence of the innocent fetus is being terminated,” Bonner wrote. “Regardless of where we stand on the issue of abortion, surely we all share the compassion that no form of life should be extinguished through a painful process when the pain can otherwise be relieved.”
Some abortion advocates dispute that pre-born humans can experience pain. For instance, a 2005 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association asserted that a fetus cannot feel pain until 28 weeks after conception. A 2006 article in Neurology Today, however, observed that “doctors readily agree that a fetus at 20 weeks and even earlier will pull away from a pin prick or other ‘noxious stimulus.’”
While that article did not concede that such a response means the fetus experiences an acutely averse sensation, research has accumulated in recent years, indicating that unborn children can feel pain by 20 weeks gestation and probably before.
“There is no question, biologically speaking, about whether an unborn child can feel pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization,” Arina O. Grossu, director of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, wrote in a 2017 review of fetal-pain research. “By 18 weeks post-fertilization, nerves link pain receptors to the brain’s thalamus (the pain processing center). By 18 weeks post-fertilization, the cerebral cortex (the region of the brain associated with higher mental functions) has acquired a full complement of neurons, meaning all of the neurons are present, though not all the connections in the cortex are fully developed until later.”
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
