I Feel Your Pain, but Not Mine

An article in The Journal of the American Medical Association is bound to stoke the battle over abortion. In it, researchers conclude that a fetus is unlikely to feel pain before 29 weeks. The conclusion casts doubt on the rationale of a bill authored by U.S. Sen. Sam Browback that would require abortion-seeking women to be offered anesthesia for the fetus because "at this stage of development, an unborn child has the physical structures necessary to experience pain."

Bottom line: Who the hell knows what a four- or five-month-old fetus can or can't feel? Granted, certain hot-button social issues are destined for perpetual debate -- abortion, the death penalty, Yankees v. Red Sox -- since, after all, they are largely matters of one's personal belief system.

But it is particularly galling and disingenuous when the zealots on both sides of the abortion fight try masking their ideological obsession in peripheral pursuits, such as the bogus Browback bill and its conceit that is based on an unknowable.

Hell, I can understand an ardent pro-life legislator pushing for a Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade better than I can understand making shit up and slapping it on to proposed legislation. I can understand an ardent pro-choicer pushing for a Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade better than I can understand the desperate insistence that the Constitution includes an explicit right to privacy (there should be, perhaps, but many liberal-minded legal scholars concede that one does not exist).

But let's stop letting the real debate get clouded by arguments about whether unicorns can fly.