Fetal Pain Legislation: Women Deserve to Know
Maggie Datiles has this post on the Americans United for Life weblog. She writes:
That a fetus can feel pain is an accepted medical fact. However, the question of when a fetus can experience pain has been the subject of some debate over the last two decades.1 The accepted medical consensus is that the sensory connections for feeling pain are present at 20 weeks gestation.2 In fact, there is a steadily increasing body of medical evidence and literature supporting the conclusion that a fetus may feel pain from around 11 to 13 weeks, or even as early as 5.5 weeks