The American Spectator

The Public Policy

The left spent much of the week feeling Hugo Chavez's pain. But it was in no mood to feel the pain of unborn children. A bogus study's claim that unborn children don't feel any pain at all generated a flurry of tendentiously hopeful media reports. "Researchers: Fetal Pain Not An Abortion Issue; Review of 2,000 Studies Concludes Fetus Feels Nothing Up to 29 Weeks," read one headline.

Who are these "researchers"? Abortion activists, it has come out. A San Francisco abortion clinic doctor and a former NARAL employee spearheaded the article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), an article which asserts unbelievably that doctors can dismember a child up to 29 weeks without the child feeling a thing.

An accurate headline on the stories would have been, "Abortionists: Fetal Pain Not An Abortion Issue." By early this week pro-lifers had made it known that the JAMA article was a propagandistic crock, cobbled together by self-serving abortionists. Yet the New York Times, in its inimitably imperious style of bias, offered not a word about the researchers' ties to the abortion industry in its straining Wednesday story, "Study Finds 29-Week Fetuses Probably Feel No Pain and Need No Abortion Anesthesia."

Probably feel no pain? Improbably is the correct word. If a doctor stabs the arm of a prematurely delivered 29-week-child, will it probably feel no pain? No, the child will howl. But according to the Times' summary of the study, crying isn't proof of pain: the "authors of the paper said that even crying or grimacing in a very premature infant did not necessarily signify pain because such infants often cry at even the lightest touch." And if they start screaming when a doctor dismembers one of their limbs? That must not mean anything either.

The Los Angeles Times treated the JAMA article as a useful press release too, but for some reason, perhaps out of prudence or just inattention and sloth, the Washington Post didn't cover the story at all. But the Associated Press, which had immediately trumpeted the false study ("Researchers say fetuses don't feel pain until late in pregnancy") compounded its ham-handed bias by burying the abortion credentials of the researchers that it didn't report in the first story in a second story about how the editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association feels embattled now that it is known she published this supposedly objective study without any disclosures ("Journal editor: Abortion opponents sending angry e-mails about article or fetal pain"). The editor told AP that the e-mails were so upsetting that she had to take a walk around the block. Only after reporting this does AP mention that the authors of the study are abortion activists whose connections are unacknowledged in the study.

Why is the left going to such lengths to propagandize that abortion is painless, using the spurious scientific cover of a report produced by abortionists? One immediate rationale for cooking up the report is to head off Sam Brownback's bill in Congress, the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act," which would require doctors to tell women before performing abortions after 20 weeks that abortion causes pain to the child and that requires doctors to offer anesthesia for the child.

The left, which insists on anesthesia-softened executions of murderers on death row, doesn't want unborn children receiving any anesthesia, arguing that it poses an "unnecessary" risk to the lives of women. Practices the left wouldn't permit at animal hospitals or penitentiaries are apparently so essential to its abortion agenda it will fake up scientific claims designed to make people feel better about not even affording the unborn child the slight courtesy of anesthesia.

While the left treats the obviously guilty as innocent, they treat unborn children as the guilty, unworthy of any basic humane considerations. As Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Margaret Sanger, blurted out honestly, the unborn child is a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family."

Only the evil enjoy the left's unequivocal defense of humane treatment. The left can simultaneously work itself up into a moral lather during the discussion of Hugo Chavez and assassination and propagate reports that encourage the targeting of children in the womb whose crying brings the left no pain.

topics:
Abortion