Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli

In an hour-long operation at Texas Children’s Hospital in October 2017, Dr. Michael Belfort, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. William Whitehead, a pediatric surgeon, performed a life-changing surgery on a tiny baby boy. He was 23 weeks in the womb since conception and diagnosed with spina bifida. Operating on the baby while still in the womb of his mother, the doctors corrected his congenital defect.

Similarly, in 2016, Dr. Darrell Cass, director of Texas Children’s Fetal Center and associate professor of surgery, pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine, operated on a baby girl in the womb who was only 24 weeks since conception. He successfully removed a tumor larger than the baby girl herself.

Ever since the 1990s, as prenatal testing and technology have improved, doctors have been performing such surgeries on babies in the womb. During these corrective surgeries, babies respond to the procedures. They flinch and move away from the sharp instruments. With the use of live-action ultrasound imaging, neonatologists have even detected that, at 20 weeks, a baby in the womb has such a developed sense of touch that drawing a single human hair across the unborn baby’s hand causes the baby to recoil and make a fist.

Doctors operating on babies in the womb are aware of the babies’ sensitivity to pain and so they administer an anesthetic to them. According to Dr. Steven Calvin, chair of the Program in Human Rights Medicine at the University of Minnesota, “the neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies.” Already at 20 weeks since conception, babies in the womb feel pain.

Recognizing the medical facts and the pain inflicted on a baby in the womb, civilized countries have begun to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. Only six countries such as China and North Korea allow these abortions. Such abortions are painful and inhumane to the child. These abortions can, as a matter of procedure, involve the brutal dismembering of an innocent child waiting to be born and take his or her rightful place at the banquet of life.

In October of last year, the House of Representatives passed a bill to put an end to these barbaric procedures. The President promised to sign it, once it passed through the House and the Senate. However, the Senate voted, with just three exceptions, along party lines and defeated the bill. The final vote was 51-46. Only three Democrats broke rank and stood for life and common sense.

Those legislators who voted against the bill, including two Republicans, are not listening to the national consensus. Nor are they listening to science or reason. They are out of step with the march for life that has been becoming stronger and stronger across the nation.

Most Americans — and that includes those who say they are for abortion — recognize the horror of late-term abortions and are against it. The Senate’s obstinate refusal to face reality and adopt the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, prohibiting abortions at 20 weeks post-fertilization is a disgrace to our nation.

Every effort needs to be made to safeguard the precious gift of life given by the Creator to every child. The sound commitment to the right to life involves a struggle that cannot diminish. It demands a constant striving to persuade our elected officials to protect the child in the womb. To ingore a politician’s stance on the fundamental right to life is a grave omission on the part of those who cherish life itself. Until every child from conception to birth is protected by just laws, abortion is not a dead issue!