The Spirituality and Miracles of St. Clare of Assisi

FETAL PAIN

The news media are today reporting on a "study" (actually, an interpretation of existing medical literature) published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors argue that there is no good evidence that unborn humans feel pain before the third trimester (after 29 weeks gestational age). Most of these stories have failed to report important information on the origins of this "study." The lead author, Susan J. Lee, is a medical student and former NARAL employee, and one of the physician authors, Eleanor Drey, is the director of the largest abortion clinic in San Francisco. Dr. Drey is also on the staff of the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy, a pro-abortion advocacy center at the University of California-San Francisco. Jill Stanek has more details on this in her blog Pro-life pulse today.

I have a real problem with pro-death people analyzing existing studies that have already been performed by someone else and then arriving at different conclusions that "validate" their views. Their analysis of existing studies is obviously biased and therefore, invalid. However, no matter what their conclusions are, the heart of the issue lies elsewhere. As Truth and Action has pointed out, fetal pain does not really matter in discussing the morality of abortion, because the ability to feel pain does not make a person a human being. The fetus is a human life, whether or not he or she feels pain.