Fetal pain issue grows in Congress

[deadparrot]

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- U.S. anti-abortion rights activists in Congress are stepping up efforts to raise awareness of fetal pain during an abortion.

A bill pending in the House called the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act would require doctors to inform women who have an abortion after 20 weeks that the fetus will feel pain and offer her the option to use anesthesia on the fetus.

One of the most recent representatives to sign on as one of the bill's 127 co-sponsors is Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, who told the Cincinnati Enquirer he would like to see abortion made illegal altogether, but since the law is on the books, he's committed to doing what he can to "protect innocent and unborn life whenever possible."

An August article in the Journal of the American Medical Association said fetuses don't feel pain until the third trimester, which spans weeks 28-40.

Chabot said premature babies born before the 28th week feel pain, so a fetus must also feel it.

Similar measures have been enacted this year in Arkansas, Georgia and Minnesota and are pending in several other states.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&article=UPI-1-20051031-13180700-bc-us-abortion.xml

[niyad]

1. more bs from the anti-choice, woman--hating right

[Triana]

32. Exactly...

...any horse shit they can fling...

[central scrutinizer]

2. so that's why they cut food stamps

to make sure more poor fetuses would feel the pain of hunger

[tk2kewl]

3. Maybe we need a "infant hunger pain" bill

point out that children who are born experience pain while starving to death

[Inland]

4. Terri Scaivos in-utero. nt

[MN ChimpH8R]

5. Ignore science, legislate prejudices

Same old Repuke bullshit. We know more than the AMA does cos Jeebus told us so. :puke: :banghead:

[xchrom]

6. protect fetuses -- kick poor children.

[Strawman]

7. how many finger in the wind Dems are saying "I feel your fetal pain"

I wonder

[mia]

8. I'm a Democrat and believe that "fetal pain" exists.

I try not to think about it, given my belief in a woman's right to choose. Abortions should be legal and rare, in my opinion.

http://www.mccl.org/news/nr082405.htm

[damntexdem]

9. Until a fetus has a working brain, at about 22 weeks, ...

it doesn't, cannot, feel anything. There may be local response to stimulus, but there is no "it" to feel pain.

[Trillo]

20. Playing the devil's advocate,

I remember that back in the 1980s it was common to operate on a newborn fetus with a repairable heart condition without anesthesia. At the time the doctors claimed that anethesia was to dangerous for the infant and it didn't matter anyway, because they couldn't feel pain.

Some friends of mine used to joke abouit how wonderful it would be if when Hitler was reincarnated he had to go through just such a procedure.

My point is where that when doctors tell me something won't cause pain, I immediately don't believe them, they used to tell me that when I was a kid and needed a shot. It was ALWAYS a LIE.

I think that a college education really gets the LIARS trained well.

[Crunchy Frog]

21. Did you know that they STILL DO IT?

In my nursing school class of a little over 50, there are at least 2 people with YOUNG children who say that they had MAJOR SURGERY with no anesthesia as newborns. Both of the children appear to have long term psychological impacts from it.

I couldn't believe it because I had been under the impression that this practice was stopped a couple of decades ago.

I think this law that they're trying to pass is BS, but, if it does pass, they should at least be able to use it to finally end the practice of doing unasthetized surgery on infants.

[AlienGirl]

25. That's awful!

How are the kids affected? Is it mostly that they're more fearful? Poor kids. :-(

Tucker

[Crunchy Frog]

28. I only remember one of the women saying that her son

is terrified by bright lights and completely freaks out when he's exposed to them, like at the photographers. The other parent said something about behavioral effects in his daughter but the details didn't really register on me.

I've actually thought about doing an assigned research paper on this issue. I find it really alarming that it's still going on.

[AlienGirl]

36. If you can get someone to sponsor the paper, you should

I've been reading about the effects of trauma on kids since I was 12, and would be really interested in what you find out. My wild-ass guess based on stuff I know completely anecdotally is that trauma that happens at an age too young to be consciously recalled has devastating effects, but that's just a guess.

Care to get into a PM discussion on this? I'm a psych geek, but not currently in any classes.

Tucker

[Crunchy Frog]

37. Well, it's probably going to be months

before I actually do anything with this paper, but I would be happy to share stuff with you as I come up with it, and can even email you a finished copy if it's any good.

This nursing program is absolutely crappy by the way. That's a story in and of itself. It really doesn't deserve my putting serious effort into a paper for it, but I want to do it for my own knowledge and hopefully to help spare some unnecessary pain in the future.

Feel free to PM me anytime.

[Realityhack]

27. The article said this would be for those after 20 weeks.

So I do not see how your point applies.

[kestrel91316]

34. Thank you. At least someone is thinking.

[Larkspur]

10. After the celebral cortex is wired, then the fetus has the capability to

feel pain, and that is around the beginning of the 3rd trimester. I have no problem with using anesthesia on a fetus at this time. Whether the celebral cortex is wired before this period hasn't been proven, but I wouldn't be surprised if the margin of being wired is one or two weeks on either side of the beginning of the 3rd trimester.

[rodeodance]

11. will this infant have health care after he/she born?--Congress needs

to get its priorites on track!

[area51]

29. "fetal pain" & healthcare

rodeodance said:

"will this infant have health care after he/she born?"

You made a point that I also was thinking of. If the anti-abortion nazis really gave a damn about children, there would be universal healthcare in this country, @ least for the children. RW lunatic fringe, don't give me any tripe about "fetal pain", when for all you care, children can die an agonizing death due to lack of medical care or parental abuse.

[n2doc]

12. But they don't give a S**t about circumcision

And the pain THAT entails for babies. Of course God told us to do that...:puke:

[Megahurtz]

17. Perfect!!!

Yeah, what about that one??? You don't hear anyone whining about that sick,
twisted and outdated practice!:crazy:

Uh huh! No pain there! :sarcasm:

[Crunchy Frog]

22. If they claim that they care about babies pain

then they better be consistent and care about ALL of it.

[Raiden]

18. Comparing abortion with circumcision??

[Zhade]

24. Yeah, nobody asked me if I wanted it whacked off.

Uh, let me rephrase that...

[Ezlivin]

13. Fetal Attraction

Do right-wingers fall in love with premature, works-in-progress things all the time?

Do they protect seeds and seedlings?

Do they fret over O2 and H before they combine to form water?

[Megahurtz]

14. Fetal pain WTF???

Do any of us remember any pain when we were inside that sack of fluid,
or when we got squished out for that matter???
I don't remember a bloody thing! (no pun intended)

They are just trying really hard on the whole fetus issue, aren't they?

[AlienGirl]

16. I doubt any of us recall pain at a month old either

Yet doctors now* anesthetize infants before performing major surgery. The issue of whether pain is felt at the time is not the same as the issue of whether pain is remembered later.

Tucker

*since about the 1980s, anyway

[AlienGirl]

15. Fetal pain does not equal fetal right to life

A steer is also capable of feeling pain, and we have some laws that reflect this fact and call for his death to be as humane as possible, but these laws do not give him an absolute right to continue living. So there is already legal precedent for laws allowing something to be killed, but minimizing the pain felt during the process.

Tucker

[norml]

19. Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence (JAMA)

Fetal Pain
A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence

Susan J. Lee, JD; Henry J. Peter Ralston, MD; Eleanor A. Drey, MD, EdM; John Colin Partridge, MD, MPH; Mark A. Rosen, MD


JAMA. 2005;294:947-954.

Context Proposed federal legislation would require physicians to inform women seeking abortions at 20 or more weeks after fertilization that the fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia administered directly to the fetus. This article examines whether a fetus feels pain and if so, whether safe and effective techniques exist for providing direct fetal anesthesia or analgesia in the context of therapeutic procedures or abortion.

snip

Evidence Synthesis Pain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimulus. Neither withdrawal reflexes nor hormonal stress responses to invasive procedures prove the existence of fetal pain, because they can be elicited by nonpainful stimuli and occur without conscious cortical processing. Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks. For fetal surgery, women may receive general anesthesia and/or analgesics intended for placental transfer, and parenteral opioids may be administered to the fetus under direct or sonographic visualization. In these circumstances, administration of anesthesia and analgesia serves purposes unrelated to reduction of fetal pain, including inhibition of fetal movement, prevention of fetal hormonal stress responses, and induction of uterine atony.

Conclusions Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester. Little or no evidence addresses the effectiveness of direct fetal anesthetic or analgesic techniques. Similarly, limited or no data exist on the safety of such techniques for pregnant women in the context of abortion. Anesthetic techniques currently used during fetal surgery are not directly applicable to abortion procedures.

snip

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/294/8/947

[Psephos]

33. Thanks for the link

We have no shortage of opinions; nice to see some solid research.

Peace.

[Kailassa]

23. No-one wants to have an abortion late just for the fun of it.

What gets to me is that the same people who will try to prevent late abortions are also the ones who won't sell you the morning after pill, and who will try to decrease availability of abortion so you have to wait for it.

As it is, many girls won't dare get checked to see if they are pregnant early, and are not able to freely get the morning after pill because this society has such a hypocritical outlook on sex that all these healthy young people are supposed to act like eunuchs. And the same moralizing garbage also dissuades "well brought up" kids from looking after contraception in the first place.

[Caoimhe]

26. It's all about control

Those without uteruses want to control those with uteruses.
Anti-choice women are just masochists IMHO.

[A-Possum]

30. Soldiers blown up in Iraq feel pain too

But they've already been born, so why worry about it?

[IndianaGreen]

31. Fertilized eggs also suffer pain when destroyed

I really hate the Xtian Taliban! Stalin never had a Religious Right problem in the USSR, perhaps we could learn a lesson or two from Comrade Stalin and apply them to America.

[drfresh]

35. What? Eggs have no brain.. -nt

[HuffleClaw]

38. this is pretty sickening

they will claim ANYTHING to further their xtian agenda. nice to see the article make this clear.