Last night, I went on an English-language Russian television show to talk about abortion. The excuse to have a renewed abortion debate was a new study from the British Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concluding that fetuses can't feel pain before 24 weeks. After that, according to the study, they're probably in a "sleeplike unconscious" state.
It's important to note that the medical community pretty much knew this already, and there's really just a couple of high-profile doctors running around conducting studies to try to prove the opposite true. But this is all a new spin on a really old attempt to sabotage the abortion debate by making it about babies instead of about women and choice. The effort to argue that fetuses feel pain, and therefore we have a duty to spare them, is the natural follow-up to the failed attempt to declare fetuses legal people. Anti-abortion advocates would have you believe fetuses are fully formed, sentient beings staring in helpless horror as a doctor's scalpel comes at them, and they'll do whatever it takes to get you to think that, too.
Except that they're not, of course. We like to imagine that fetuses jump into the womb ready to come out because it's hard for us to deal with just how fragile life is, and the very first jumbled collection of cells are a precarious mass of delicate complexity. Any number of things can go horribly wrong. While the belief that life begins at conception may be deeply held, we have to be able to accept that the way those cells interact and grow is nothing like what it is for fully formed humans. The differences probably include the ways in which a fetus can feel pain.
My fellow interlocutor last night was the otherwise lovely Janice Crouse from the anti-abortion group, Concerned Women of American, and she used some pretty old-timey arguments to argue against abortion. She kept saying that the biggest jump in abortion is among 20- and 30-year-olds, and basically, they should have known better. These aren't panicked teenagers, she said. The truth is, it was never just a panicked teenager here and there. For as long as there have been pregnancies, there have been ways to end them: Hippocrates's Gynecological Corpus is full of ways ancient women used to prevent or terminate pregnancies. The only difference now is that it's medicalized, safe, and increasingly normal.
-- Monica Potts