The left has conveniently forgotten a rather glaring detail about the Roe v Wade case they want to resuscitate and turn into law.
It never has been a blank check to abortion rights people. It was a compromise between two priorities caught in tension. The left loves to point to the rights of the woman and physical autonomy… while conveniently leaving the other side of the equation out of discussion.
That other side of the equation is exactly the reason Barack Obama — who infamously voted ‘present’ on an Illinois law that would have required medical care to a baby who survived an abortion attempt long enough to draw his first breath — ducked the question about when life begins in the womb. ‘Above my pay grade’ was his glib reply.
A more honest answer on his part might have been something along the lines of life begins ‘when and if the mother decides the baby is worth bringing into the world’.
There was another side of the tension Roe v Wade tried to keep in balance: the State’s obligation to protect the life in the womb.
Medicine and diagnostic equipment in the 1970s was nothing like it is today, so the judgments about when life might begin were little more than a crude guess.
If the decision had been made in today’s environment, we have all sorts of metrics a court could have taken into consideration — not just heartbeat, but brain waves and pain response among other factors — that could shape their decision about when life begins.
Once that life truly begins, the state has a legal and moral obligation to protect it. You don’t hear abortion bringing up that part of Roe. Ever.
Because it’s an awkward question. And then it got trickier.
Before now, the scientific consensus was that it took until about the 24th week of gestation for the nervous system to develop sufficiently that it could feel and react to pain.
Abortions performed before that stage of development were therefore thought to be something the fetus could not experience. That was included as part of the ‘clump of cells’ rational to justify abortion.
That benchmark for feeling pain is no longer the current scientific consensus. In 2021, the following headline appeared on a press release:
American College of Pediatricians: Unborn Children Feel Pain
That 12 January 2021 article is still posted on their website. The text reads as follows:
In its recent position statement, Fetal Pain: What is the Scientific Evidence, the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) reviews the laboratory and clinical data which indicates that as early as 12 weeks gestation (and possibly earlier) exposure to painful stimuli negatively affects these immature human beings. While it is obviously unethical to harm innocent human beings irrespective of their ability to perceive pain, because of the resulting acute stress responses and subsequent potential long-term negative effects, the ACPeds holds that avoiding, mitigating, and directly treating fetal, neonatal, and pediatric pain is a medical and ethical obligation.
This paper describes both where the standard of care for pain management in this population once was, where it is now, and the evidence behind the changes that resulted in dramatic medical practice improvements in neonatal and pediatric pain management.
ACPeds board member and neonatologist Dr. Robin Pierucci stated, “Painful acts cause harm to developing unborn children and premature infants regardless of their level of conscious perception, and this fact cannot ethically be ignored.”
Informed by the evidence, ACPeds advocates the need for in-utero, neonatal, and pediatric pain prevention, mitigation, and treatment. Medicine’s double standard of acknowledging pain capability in wanted premature babies while denying it in unwanted unborn babies of the same gestational age is unconscionable.
The emphasis was added. Pay particular attention to the final sentence in the presser.
Paraphasing a little — when a baby is wanted and has medical difficulty in utero, we bend over backward to mitigate any pain that little one might experience.
It is medical malpractice to treat two otherwise identical lives differently when the only determining distinction between them are the willingness or unwillingness of the mother to bring them to term.
If exposing a wanted baby to certain painful procedures, would raise objections and warrant some kind of mitigation, we are lying to ourselves if we say the otherwise identical child is not suffering.
And to underscore the point again — current scientific understanding indicates the suffering they are feeling can begin at any time after 12 weeks.
Paging all those ‘believe the science’ people. This is your time to shine!
Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.
Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.
This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.
