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Nebraska Passes Law Prohibiting Abortion After Twenty Weeks: Implications for Abortion and Animal Rights

By ADF Alliance Alert

Sherry F. Kolb writes at Findlaw: Earlier this month, the State of Nebraska passed a law, scheduled to go into effect later this year, prohibiting all abortions after the twentieth week of pregnancy, with some very narrow exceptions. The express reason for selecting twenty weeks as the cut-off point was that some experts say that this is when a fetus begins to experience pain. The new measure represents a significant development in the evolution of pro-life theory. The line that is drawn, between permissible and impermissible abortion, is sentience. It is not conception, or viability (which was the focus of Roe v. Wade), or 'quickening,' but sentience, the capacity to suffer and experience pain. The decision to draw this line ? between non-sentience and sentience ? as the basis for an abortion prohibition, has important implications for debates about nonhuman animals, and for linking some objectives of the anti-abortion movement with those of the animal rights movement. It also provides an occasion for reflection among those who oppose and those who support a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy . . . "

Full post as published by Constitutionally Correct on April 28, 2010 (boomark / email).