AMERICAN DOCTORS SUPPORT BILL TO PREVENT THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FROM MURDERING "MINOR CHILDREN"
May 22, 2012
Medical experts have voiced support for legislation to ban abortion in the nation’s capital after 20 weeks, the age at which many scientists believe an unborn child is capable of feeling pain.
The field of neonatal care recognizes pain “as an important entity to be acknowledged, measured, and treated,” said Dr. Colleen Malloy, an assistant professor in the neonatology division at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Malloy testified at a May 17 hearing before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. The hearing discussed the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
Introduced by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), the bill would prohibit all abortions in D.C. beyond 20 weeks fetal age, except to save the life of the mother.
The bill has more than 190 co-sponsors. A Senate version, introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), has 23 co-sponsors.
Opponents of the bill argue that it cannot be proven that a 20-week-old fetus has the capacity to feel pain.
However, Malloy pointed to “ample biologic, physiologic, hormonal, and behavioral evidence for fetal and neonatal pain,” including similar physical reactions and a rise in stress hormones like that of an older infant or child when presented with a pain-causing stimulus.
Discussions involving a 20-week-old fetus do not need to rely solely on ultrasound images, she said. Rather, scientific developments have allowed premature patients at 20 weeks to be observed “right before our eyes in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.”
Malloy explained that standards for neonatal intensive care units require “attention to and treatment of neonatal pain.” She also observed that pain medication is used in neonatal surgery.
“There is no reason to believe that a born infant would feel pain any differently than that same infant were he or she still in utero,” she said. “Thus, the difference between fetal and neonatal pain is simply the locale in which the pain occurs. The receiver’s experience of the pain is the same.”
Testifying against the legislation was Christine Zink, a Washington, D.C. mother who aborted her son at 22 weeks “out of love.”
Zink said that during her pregnancy, she “would often wonder about whose eyes the baby might have and who my child might grow up to be.”
However, during her 21st week of pregnancy, she discovered that parts of her son’s brain had failed to develop.
“Where the typical human brain presents a lovely, rounded symmetry, our baby had small, globular splotches,” she said.
The condition meant that Zink’s son was not guaranteed to survive until birth, and if he did, he would likely die soon after.
When she realized that “medical science could not solve this tragedy,” Zink decided that the “prognosis was unbearable” and chose to abort her child rather than give birth to a son who “might have never left the hospital.”
She argued that the proposed bill “is downright cruel” and would have brought pain to her and her family by requiring her “to carry to term and give birth to a baby” who would have had to undergo surgeries and suffering, and whom the doctors agreed “had no chance of a life.”
Dr. Byron Calhoun, professor and vice chair of the OB-GYN Department at West Virginia University-Charleston, argued that abortion is not “the necessary and appropriate way to deal with a fetus with significant physical anomalies.”
He cited his own training in high-risk pregnancies and nearly 25 years of experience to counter the idea that a brief and imperfect life is not worth living.
Rather than aborting a child with a fetal anomaly, Calhoun recommended “perinatal hospice,” which he described as a holistic option for providing “physical, emotional, and spiritual support for dying patients and their families.”
“The family is placed in the center of the care and there is a continuum of support from the diagnosis, through death, and grief,” he explained.
Perinatal hospices, which exist in 34 states in the U.S., treat the dying with dignity, recognizing even in their last hours that they are “alive and not yet dead,” he said.
