Biden, Abby Johnson react to Supreme Court arguments over Mississippi's abortion law
Doctors push back on Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s claim that only a ‘small fringe of doctors’ believe unborn babies can feel pain before 24 weeks gestation
Pro-lifers had a particularly strong reaction to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s line of questioning. Specifically, they took issue with her assertion that the belief that unborn babies can feel pain before they reach 24 weeks gestation is only supported by a “small fringe of doctors.”
The liberal justice, appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama in 2009, also asserted her belief that “A gross minority of doctors … believe fetal pain exists before 24, 25 weeks. It’s a huge minority and one not well founded in science at all.”
In a statement released Wednesday, Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie, a senior fellow with The Catholic Association, asserted that Sotomayor’s comments about fetal pain “were wholly ignorant of the tremendous scientific advances in fetal medicine.”
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“Not only does medicine agree that ... anesthesia be administered for fetal surgery, a clear reflection of the medical consensus that unborn babies can feel pain, but like viability, the line marking when they feel pain continues to inch earlier,” Christie said.
“As recently as last year, doctors in the Journal of Medical Ethics wrote, ‘Current neuroscientific evidence supports the possibility of fetal pain before the ‘consensus’ cutoff of 24 weeks and may be as early as 12 weeks,” she added.
Dr. David Prentice, the vice president of research at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, urged Sotomayor to “follow the science, which has not stood still since Roe was decided in 1973.” He noted that “modern research is revealing that unborn babies do feel pain at an early stage, and we see that science in action regularly during fetal surgery, in which doctors apply anesthesia in utero to prevent the suffering of the unborn child.”
Previous analysis from the Charlotte Lozier Institute has concluded that while “most neuroscientists have operated by the axiom of ‘cortical necessity,’” or “the idea that a cerebral cortex — the thin, convoluted, outer layer of the brain that activates between 24 and 30 weeks gestation — is required to perceive pain,” “accumulating studies, especially two from 2016, strongly imply that cortical necessity is incorrect.”
Instead, the studies have determined that “subcortical (lower) brain structures that develop much earlier than 24 to 30 weeks are sufficient for pain perception.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
