Keep Abortion Safe and Painful

Hat tip to the NYTimes for mentioning the proposed Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. Sponsor Sam Brownback sums up the arguments for the bill:

Unborn children can experience pain. This is why unborn children are often administered anesthesia during in utero surgeries.

Think about the pain that unborn children can experience, and then think about the more gruesome abortion procedures. Of course, we have heard about Partial Birth Abortion, but also consider the D&E abortion. During this procedure, commonly performed after 20-weeks--when there is medical evidence that the child can experience severe pain--the child is torn apart limb from limb. Think about how that must feel to a young human.

We would never allow a dog to be treated this way. Yet, the creature we are talking about is a young, unborn child.

I would love to see this bill passed, as a regulation of what has remained one of the least-regulated areas of medicine (if abortion can be called medicine). If pro-lifers make a real public-relations bid out of this, they'll be able to score some serious points, not only in discouraging abortions but also in showing what the pro-choice folks are really 'pro'.

The effective way for the pro-choice people to combat this, incidentally, would be to write a competing law simply requiring fetus anasthesia for all abortions past a certain point. This would incur a small cost on the doctors, but would leave the pro-life politicians in the uncomfortable position of not 'protecting' every fetus from pain (though protecting more from death). If the pro-choicers don't do this, they have the potential to lose and lose badly.