Friday, February 15, 2008

NY Times Story On Babies' Pain

Abortion Backers Can't Ignore New York Times Story That Babies Feel Pain

"Pioneering the field of fetal pain is Dr. Kanwaljeet (Sunny) Anand. Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Anand was a resident in the neonatal intensive care unit at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England. Many of his patients were preterm infants in need of surgery and Dr. Anand soon discovered that infants returning from surgery were in significant distress and he had to spend considerable time stabilizing them.

Getting permission to observe the surgeries, Dr. Anand realized that the problem was likely that these tiny children were given a paralytic to hold them still during surgery but no anesthesia. The assumption was that their nervous system was too immature to register pain. Dr. Anand thought the opposite was true.

Working on that theory, Dr. Anand was able to show through clinical trials that preterm infants did indeed perceive pain and that babies who were operated on without anesthesia had a “massive stress response. ” Babies who were anesthetized during surgery were more stable afterwards and Dr. Anand showed that anesthesia during surgery decreased the mortality rate of these children from 25 percent to 10 percent.

Today, it would be considered barbaric to perform surgery on a newborn or preterm infant without anesthesia.


If it's considered barbaric to operate on them without anesthesia, what do aborion proponents think they feel when the baby is being murdered in the womb?