Jivin J’s Life Links 6-25-10
by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat
The assumptions used to calculate the 70k are debatable and the methodology isn’t up to scientific standards. In the end, 70k is nothing more than a stab in the dark by the WHO’s own admission….
…[R]esearchers repeatedly clarify how hard it is to study the issue due to the lack of data. One citation (of many) reads: “As there are no feasible data collection methods that can reliably reflect the overall burden of unsafe abortion, one is left to work with incomplete information on incidence and mortality from community studies or hospitals…. This is then adjusted to correct for misreporting and under-reporting.” It’s no big surprise that some of the world’s poorest or war-torn nations don’t keep impeccable abortion statistics. So researchers rely on assumption after assumption.
Prof. Allan Templeton, president of the Royal College, who chaired the review, told The Times that research put forward by anti-abortion campaigners that the human foetus did feel pain at or before 24 weeks was based on evidence from premature babies. This did not apply to the foetus in the womb, he said.
Huh? Well, what if the premature babies were younger than 24 weeks? Wouldn’t that destroy the presumption that before 24 weeks the nerve endings aren’t sufficiently formed?

Mr. Baird, 78, who once ran the nation’s first abortion clinic, was among those attending the NRLC Convention at the Hyatt Regency Pittsburgh International Airport on Thursday. A regular attendee, his routine for decades has been to picket from 11:30 to noon on behalf of abortion rights, then join his rivals for lunch inside.
[24 week photo via wpclinic.org; Baird photo via boston.com]

A CPC in Austin was also vandalized with the word “ABORT!” spray painted on an outside wall.
“Researchers” rely on assumption after assumption.”
These are hardly researchers. Another example of people using shoddy “research” to promote their agenda. Something akin to the early claims by NARAL that American women died by the thousands every year from illegal abortion and a lapdog media, anxious to promote the abortion agenda, lapping it up.
Nahhh, groups and individuals are never influenced by personal bias or a political agenda.
I rest my case Jill G.
Hi Jill,
Thank you so much for reporting on the awful RCOG release. National Right to Life will be streaming the audio from the session today on fetal pain at 9pm this evening. Please see http://www.nrlcomm.wordpress.com for more information on that.
Steven Zielinski, J.D., M.D., Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., and Burke Balch, J.D., spoke this morning on the irrefutable medical facts surrounding the pain of the unborn. As this heats up and becomes a larger and larger issue around the landmark Nebraska law, I’m sure your readers would appreciate more information on the subject.
A retired issue is whether newborns could feel pain at all. 30 years ago, many open-chest procedures and so on were done on infants without anesthesia.
When hit with this issue, some of the docs would then change the argument to be: well, we cannot tell, but if they can, they will not remember it later in life, since they are not yet at the point of development to have memories.
This is a research track: does neonatal pain have a lasting efect, and if so, what is the effect. This topic is only growing, and is not “settled” anymore. It is in the nursing literature so the nurses in this audience may be familiar with this issue.
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/980222-overview
I predict as the fetal pain issue progresses in public discourse, you will hear this old sawhorse trotted out: that fetuses cannot feel pain, and if they can, so what.
These people are brutal.
Well, if they can’t feel pain its fine to kill them.
and on and on and on it goes…….
btw my 4 1/2 year old loves the photo of the 24 week old baby in utero. So do I.
This nurse has been taught that it is settled that newborns DO feel pain and we are required to provide appropriate pain relief and if necessary, sedation, for performing procedures on neonates.
As many of the neonates I have worked with have been preterm neonates, as young as 24 weeks, I fail to see how anyone can think that the preborn do not feel pain.
hi folks,
I find this non-recognition of the importance of fetal/birth pain weird. There was even a whole psychiatric discipline (book, a birthing procedure called the Leboyer Method, etc.) dedicated specifically to end birthing trauma and lifelong holdover consequences induced by trauma at birh.
[I’ve even heard of one practice that allows the placenta and newborn to be birthed intact. Apparently a newborn and its placenta share the same blood supply via the umbilical chord. At times, the placenta has almost 75% of this blood supply.
Rather than cutting-the-cord at birth (questionably the ‘best’), this method slowly allows the child to drain the blood (stem cells.]
This bizarre scenario has IMO some profound effects. A large loss of blood supply would ‘threaten’ the continued existence of any newborn, right at birth. Does such an event also instill lifelong FEAR as a basis of their ‘humanity’?
Sorry, I’ve a bit more for your consideration …
PL’ers often talk about the process of ‘desensitization’ and talk of abortion being a ‘holocaust’. Never do they realize that they too have become desensitized/victimized as babes, at their own birth. This ‘skewing’ of the-intrinsic-value-of-human-life makes ‘others’ our ‘enemies’/’the-other-side, n’est pas?
Why do we never ever talk about INCREASING sensitivity? Instead of guns, we use words, TO WIN! Words often kill. Do we wish a dead opponent?