Witch Doctors At Their Work

British physicians have taken time away from their patient-crammed waiting rooms and busy schedules of packing desperately ill people off with an “Oh, slap a hot water bottle on it and you’ll feel better in the morning” to declare that fetuses before the age of 24 weeks do not feel pain, and thus may be rubbed out without even the tiniest bit of conscience-pricking for Mum or abortionist.  Really? By my count, 24 weeks = six months, and if memory serves, which it does, a not-yet-born baby  is a reactive little soul even before the six-month mark, who doesn’t much like it when his mommy stands shivering in a cold wind and kicks her abundantly to let her know, who moves suddenly—or stops moving suddenly—at the opening strains of Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor or Heat Wave by Martha and the Vandellas, who wiggles in a very particular way upon hearing the tones of her daddy’s voice. Earlier versions of the same doctors—men, mostly, in those days—performed surgeries on already-born babies without anesthesia on the very same grounds: their nervous systems were not fully developed, they wouldn’t feel the scalpel slicing, the retractor opening, the bones cracking . . . need I go on? Are we all dupes and sheep, to be herded into the witch-doctoring huts of abortionists, late-term abortionists, and advocates of the occasional act of infanticide, when there are daily new discoveries in the science of the womb and the certainties of pregnancy and motherhood to be relied upon?