Can preborn children feel the pain of the abortion that kills them?
That’s the question posed to Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist, in the first video of Live Action’s Face to Face series. In the video, abortion survivor Claire Culwell says that she survived her birth mother’s D&E (dilation and evacuation) abortion, which killed her twin. “I’ve always wondered what my twin experienced,” she says to Levatino, “And what maybe I experienced in the womb next to my twin.”
Levatino explains that though he is not an expert on fetal pain, he has felt a preborn child flinch and pull away from a needle inserted into the amniotic sac during a diagnostic amniocentesis.
“We’re talking 16 and 17 weeks, so anyone who sits there and tells you that these fetuses can’t feel pain, I don’t believe that for a minute,” he told Culwell. “They would feel the pain of being dismembered until and unless that anesthesia kicked in — if they’re even using the kind of anesthesia that would do that.”
A D&E abortion is a brutal procedure in which the abortionist uses a Sopher clamp to tear the arms and legs off of the preborn child. Often, the child’s head is too big to come out in one piece, so the skull is crushed before it is removed from the womb.
“You will know you have it right when you crush down on the clamp and see a pure white gelatinous material issue from the cervix,” Levatino explained in a previous Live Action video. “That was the baby’s brains. You can then extract the skull pieces. If you have a really bad day like I often did, a little face may come out and stare back at you….”
READ: A growing number of Americans call themselves ‘pro-choice’ – but what’s really behind it?
Studies have shown that preborn children old enough to undergo a second-trimester D&E procedure are most certainly capable of feeling the process of being dismembered. Multiple studies and mounting evidence point to these children feeling pain as early as eight to 12 weeks gestation.
In 2012, Dr. Colleen Malloy, assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, testified at a hearing for the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, stating her belief that these preborn children may even have a greater sense of pain than others.
“I firmly believe, as the evidence shows, that the fetal pain experience is no less than the neonatal or adult pain experience,” she said. “It may even be greater than that which you or I would experience from dismemberment or other physical injury.”
Culwell is the survivor of a brutal and undoubtedly painful abortion. What she experienced was a traumatic procedure that is championed by so many today, yet leads to the deaths of countless innocent human beings — including her twin.
