#TheyFeelPain: New York Times Attacks 'Theory of Pain-Based Abortion Limits'

The New York Times is obviously still smarting from the pro-aborts' debacle in Texas.

See, "Theory on Pain Is Driving Rules for Abortions":

It challenges four decades of constitutional doctrine and is based on disputed scientific theories.

Yet a push to ban abortion at 20 weeks after conception, on the theory that the fetus can feel pain at that point, has emerged as a potent new tactic of the anti-abortion movement. Advocates saw the potential of such a measure because it taps into public concern about late-stage abortions, appears to alter the rules only incrementally, and claims to be rooted in science.

“Any time we talk about developmental landmarks of the unborn child, anything showing that the unborn child is a member of the human family — that gets the public to take a closer look at abortion,” said Mary Spaulding Balch, the state policy director of the National Right to Life Committee, who is widely seen as the architect of 20-week legislation.

The 20-week ban was first adopted in 2010 in Nebraska, where conservatives aimed to rein in one well-known abortion doctor. A pain-based abortion limit has now been enacted in a dozen states, most recently in Texas, and a bill to impose one nationally passed the Republican-controlled House in June. One recent poll, while affirming public support for legal abortion over all, suggested that a majority of people would draw the line at 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Abortion rights advocates call the pain argument duplicitous and say the laws will be declared unconstitutional, arguing that they are a reflection of Republican gains in state legislatures and not a shift in public opinion. But they have also been forced to mobilize against 20-week bills in state after state, and they credit their opponents with effective marketing.

“These laws are cloaked in the language of two-week increments, rather than banning abortion at conception or other more radical measures,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University. “They are cutting back on women’s constitutional rights, but less dramatically, so they trigger less alarm across society.”

In the three states where the bans have been legally challenged, the courts blocked them. In the standard laid out by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and elaborated on in later decisions, women have a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, around 24 weeks into pregnancy.

But proponents of 20-week bans hope that one of the cases will be accepted by the Supreme Court. Reading into opinions by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the likely swing voter, they are hoping for a legal upheaval.

With these bills, the anti-abortion movement is tapping into a powerful strand in the complex tangle of public opinion on abortion. Support for legal abortion drops when people are asked about the later stages of pregnancy.

In a Gallup poll last December, 61 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, but 27 percent said it should be legal in the second three months, and 14 percent in the final three.

Since then, other pollsters have started asking about a 20-week limit — evidence that opponents of abortion have injected the proposed cutoff into the public discourse, said Michael Dimock, the director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

By any measure, the practical impact of a 20-week ban is small compared with the potential legal and symbolic effects. In all cases but one, in Arizona, the laws ban abortions at the 20th week after fertilization, which is the 22nd week after the last menstrual period, the most common way of describing pregnancy. The estimate of fetal viability at around 24 weeks is also timed from the last menstrual period, so the actual gap between the two approaches is about two weeks, involving several thousand abortions, at most, out of an estimated 1.2 million performed every year.

Only "several thousand abortions" out of over a million each year in the left's genocide of the unborn.

Regressive leftists are evil baby killers. They're despicable people. Just disgusting.

There's still more at that top link, but again notice how the baby killers are "abortion rights activists" while the protectors of the unborn are "anti-abortion," to make it seem as if that's something shameful.

Killing the unborn is the ultimate shame. That's why I can never ever condone the ideology of the left. The have a romance with death. Leftism is an ideology of death and destruction of human decency. I never support these people. Never.