As you’re clicking through your email, please pause here with me for a moment and consider this:
On January 6 in Washington, DC, Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona and Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee reintroduced the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. The bill would protect unborn babies from 20 weeks’ gestation, the start of the sixth month, based on evidence that developing babies at that age feel agonizing pain when they’re aborted. A vote is scheduled the same day as the annual March for Life on Thursday, January 22.
Who would’ve thought that America could be so cruel to its smallest and most vulnerable citizens that we’d need such a law to stop them?
This same legislation passed the House during the last Congress, but Harry Reid refused to let it come to a vote in the Senate. The sweeping shift in Congress—thanks to voters like you last November—gives us hope that this pro-life legislation can make headway. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina will introduce companion legislation in the Senate and Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has promised to bring it to a vote.
Some in the pro-life movement question the bill, obviously not because they favor abortion but because they believe it doesn’t go far enough; what about defenseless babies before 20 weeks? Support for the Pain-Capable bill must in no way be construed as surrender to abortion at any point. We are at war, and wars are won battle by battle. Social media is buzzing, and the hideous reality of abortion is becoming clearer to those who in the past have mindlessly swallowed the “reproductive justice” pablum served up by Planned Parenthood.
Clarity is coming to Americans even while others who support abortion continue to deny reality. On January 8, Salon published “They’re not based in science”: Why GOP’s already pulling a post-election bait-and-switch. The article quoted Anne Davis, a late-term abortionist. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t believe that 20-week-old babies in utero feel pain. She said, “What we know in terms of the brain and the nervous system in a fetus is that the part of the brain that perceives pain is not connected to the part of the body that receives pain signals until about 26 weeks from the last menstrual period, which is about 24 weeks from conception.”
Contrary to this abortionist’s assertion (I decline to call her a doctor), the group called Doctors on Fetal Paincites more than a decade of extensive research on fetal pain and says, “For the purposes of surgery on unborn children, fetal anesthesia is routinely administered” and “it has also been shown that fetuses feel pain from week 18. This has given rise to the practice of using fetal anesthesia for surgery or invasive diagnostic procedures in utero.”
The question is obvious to me and no doubt also to you: if babies can’t feel pain in the womb, why do they need anesthesia?
Pain-capable laws are already on the books in 10 states. I stand with those lawmakers who want to see such protection extended nationwide. Please contact your legislators before next Thursday and urge them to vote in favor. You can find their contact information on our website.
I’ll be in Washington, DC, for Thursday’s March for Life and I’ll be praying for passage of this life-saving legislation. Please be in prayer with me.
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