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.