Nebraska Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood

The Abortion Pain Prevention Act (LB1103) was introduced by Nebraska Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood last Thursday. It would ban the killing of unborn babies capable of feeling pain absent a significant risk to the mother. Specifically LB1103 prevents abortion after 20 weeks in the absence of such a significant risk to the mother.
 
I’ll come back to this in a moment, but first an important detour into how the law is designed to prevent abortionists from rendering it toothless.
 
Nebraska law bans abortions past the age of viability except to "preserve the life or health of the mother." The stay-out-of-jail card for abortionists has been that they are allowed to decide for themselves what constitutes a threat to the “health” of the mother.
 
The Supreme Court has gradually come to understand the illogic of giving a single abortionist, or a handful of abortionists, veto power. In 2000, dissenting in Stenberg v. Carhart (the case that struck Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion), Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote,
 
“[T]he Court holds the ban on the D&X procedure fails because it does not include an exception permitting an abortionist to perform a D&X whenever he believes it will best preserve the health of the woman. …
[T]he Court awards each physician a veto power of the State’s judgment that the procedure should not be performed. Requiring Nebraska to defer to Dr. Carhart’s judgment is no different than forbidding Nebraska from enacting a ban at all; for it now Dr. Leroy Carhart who sets abortion policy for the State of Nebraska, not the legislature or the people. Casey [a  1992 decision] does not give precedence to the views of a single physician or a group of physicians regarding the relative safety of a particular procedure.”
  
Subsequently, in the 2007 case of Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld Congress’ ban on partial-birth abortion, Kennedy wrote,
 
“The …premise, that the state, from the inception of pregnancy, maintains its own regulatory interest in protecting the life of the fetus that may become a child, cannot be set at naught by interpreting Casey’s requirement of a health exception so it becomes tantamount to allowing a doctor to choose the abortion method he or she might prefer.”
 
This is a crucially important consideration which the new Nebraska law addresses.  After the 20-week point, an abortionist must appeal to an objective standard if he says a pregnancy is a threat to a woman’s health, not to what he prefers to do!
 
Physicians who specialize in high-risk pregnancies, as well as the medical textbooks that discuss these risks, are in agreement. In virtually all instances where a pregnant woman comes in with a medical emergency, the recommended course of action is to stabilize her condition. Aborting the child does not help the mother. The trauma of an abortion greatly increases the chance that the mother will die!
 
Back to the question of pain.
 
Because an unborn child is unable to articulate his or her pain, you prove their capacity for perceiving pain indirectly by showing they have the hardware and that they actually respond to painful stimuli.
 
Over the years we’ve run many, many articles in National Right to Life News documenting the growing consensus that at a point no later than 20 weeks, all the physical structures necessary to experience pain have developed in an unborn child.
 
Dr. Jean Wright, an anesthesiologist specializing in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, offered an illuminating metaphor in congressional testimony.
 
“[A]n unborn fetus after 20 weeks of gestation, has all the prerequisite anatomy, physiology, hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical current to close the loop and create the conditions needed to perceive pain. In a fashion similar to explaining the electrical wiring to a new house, we would explain that the circuit is complete from skin to brain and back.”
 
Also, in the words of Dr. Richard T.F. Schmidt, past President of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “It can be clearly demonstrated that fetuses seek to evade certain stimuli in a manner which an infant or an adult would be interpreted as a reaction to pain.”
  
In addition, increases in their stress hormones have been measured when unborn children receive a painful stimulus, as Dr. Kanwaljeet J.S. Anand explained in an expert report submitted to a Federal District Court that was reviewing the congressional ban on partial-birth abortions.
 
The Abortion Pain Prevention Act has already been referred to a committee in Nebraska's one-house legislature. The current session ends April 14.
 
Stay tuned to TN&V. We will keep you posted.

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