Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, this week the Senate is considering the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. This legislation would protect unborn children who have reached the age of 20 weeks--that is 5 months of pregnancy--from being killed by abortion.

Five months into a pregnancy, babies are sucking their thumbs, they are yawning and stretching, they are actively moving around, they respond to noises, and they feel and respond to pain.

The scientific evidence on this point is incontrovertible. Five months into a pregnancy, unborn babies feel pain. Their stress hormones spike, and they shrink from painful stimuli. In fact, some scientific evidence suggests that babies of this age feel pain more keenly than adults since some of the neural mechanisms that inhibit pain don't fully develop until after birth.

Babies are regularly born weeks or months early in this country and with medical care survive and often thrive.

A Time magazine article from May 2014 that highlighted the tremendous advances that have been made in the treatment of premature babies noted that 76 percent of babies born at 25 weeks of pregnancy--or about 6 months--will go on to leave the hospital.

A May 2015 article of the New York Times entitled ``Premature Babies May Survive at 22 Weeks if Treated, Study Finds'' highlighted a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting on successes in treating extremely early premature births. One baby mentioned in the New York Times article, Alexis Hutchinson, was delivered at 22 weeks and 1 day. She weighed 1.1 pounds at delivery. Today, the Times reports, ``aside from being more vulnerable to respiratory viruses, Alexis is a healthy 5-year-old girl.'' Let me repeat that. Alexis Hutchinson, who was born at 22 weeks and 1 day--or approximately halfway through her mother's pregnancy--is today a healthy 5-year-old girl. Yet, under the laws of this country, a baby of the very same age can be killed by abortion.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 15,000 late-term abortions are performed each year in the United States. Many of those babies could have survived if instead of being aborted they had been born in a hospital and given medical care.

Late-term abortion procedures are so brutal, it is difficult to even talk about them. Americans would rightly shrink in horror from performing one of these procedures on an animal. How, then, are we allowing these procedures to be performed on our children?

Right now only seven countries in the world allow elective abortion after 5 months of pregnancy. It is hard to believe the United States is one of them. Among those countries are China and North Korea. Unfortunately, our country is on that list. I suggest that might not be the company we want to keep when it comes to protecting human life.

A society is measured by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members, and we have been failing some of ours. But we have a chance with this legislation to start fixing that today.

Ultimately, it is very simple: That unborn baby--the one with the fingers and toes, who sucks her thumb and responds to her mother's voice--that unborn baby is one of us, and as such she deserves to be protected. I hope the United States Senate will vote in support of protecting our unborn and vote in favor of this legislation when we have that opportunity tomorrow.

I yield the floor.

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