Doctors Tell Congress Babies in Womb Feel Pain

Liberty Counsel Action has pledged its full support of HR 1797, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill to provide protection for unborn children 20 weeks or older, who have the capacity to experience pain while being aborted.

In compelling testimony, health professionals disclosed the horrors of second-trimester abortions and the pain those preborn babies experience. In his testimony, Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist, described the process of inserting a 13-inch Sopher clamp with 2 1/2-inch jaws at the end with rows of sharp teeth.

“Once you have grasped something inside, squeeze on the clamp to set the jaws and pull hard—really hard. You feel something let go, and out pops a fully formed leg about 6 inches long. … Reach in again and again with the clamp and tear out the spine, intestines, heart and lungs.”

Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel Action, says this is the reality of “so-called ‘reproductive health care.'”

“Cloaked in compassionate words, pro-abortionists do not care about women’s health or fetal pain. In fact, Planned Parenthood and its minions fight against laws to bring abortion facilities up to basic medical clinic standards, require abortionists to have admitting rights at hospitals, or allow women to see a sonogram image of their unborn child before an abortion,” he says.

Levatino further revealed that after the first trimester, “any attempt to perform an abortion ‘to save the mother’s life’ would entail undue and dangerous delay.” Instead, OB-GYNs perform a cesarean section if the mother’s life is at risk, often saving both the mother and the preborn child.

“The pro-abortion business does not want Americans to know what neurobiologist Dr. Maureen Condic revealed yesterday: A fetus responds to pain just like you and me, by withdrawing from the painful stimulus,” Staver said Friday.

The director of human embryology instruction for the University of Utah School of Medicine told the subcommittee, “The neural circuitry responsible for the most primitive response to pain, the spinal reflex, is in place by eight weeks of development.”

Staver adds: “In facilities hiding behind signs that advertise ‘Women’s Health,’ nurses like Jill L. Stanek experience appalling stories of babies who survive abortion only to be zipped alive a biohazard bag.”

“Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., the author of HR 1797, quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said, ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’ Liberty Counsel Action will not be silent until every American has the right to life—from conception to natural death,” Staver concludes.