Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is joined by anti-abortion leaders while introducing the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act during a news conference at the US Capitol on November 7, 2013, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
This week, the Senate takes up an unconstitutional bill recently passed 237-189 in the House that would ban all abortion after 20 weeks. The deceptively named “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” (H.R. 36) would “make it a crime for any person to perform or attempt to perform an abortion if the probable post-fertilization age of the fetus is 20 weeks or more.”
The claim that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks has been thoroughly debunked. Published at the Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine, a 2011 review of more than 150 studies has confirmed that a fetus’s neurological system is not developed enough at 20 weeks to register pain; the connection between the brain and the rest of the body simply doesn’t exist.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the lungs don’t develop until 26 weeks, making any delivery before then of the highest risk. A 2015 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine followed babies delivered before 27 weeks from birth through their toddler years and found that only 18 of the 78 “22-weekers” had survived, only seven were without moderate or severe impairments, and these were preemies with access to exceptional neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) care.
The evidence is not new, and yet abortion opponents continue to draw a line in the sand at this arbitrary point during pregnancy. Its arbitrariness makes this bill and those like it unconstitutional as well. As Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions have determined over the past 44 years, states have a vested interest in “potential life,” but may not prohibit the termination of a pregnancy before the fetus can survive on its own — albeit with great assistance from modern medicine. Abortion opponents in Congress seem…