Abortion and fetal pain

Janet Radcliffe-Richards writes a good post explaining why recent research showing that the fetus doesn’t feel pain in the first two trimesters shouldn’t threaten the pro-life groups that dispute it. The reason is that most pro-life arguments, e.g. arguments based on the “sanctity of life,” are unaffected by whether or not a fetus feels pain (we are not valuable in virtue of our physical sensations!). Richards concludes that the relevance of fetal pain to the pro-life movement must be primarily political, as a tool of deception. Finally, a nice discussion follows about how we only know the political relevance of “facts” if we know the particular values of policy-makers.

I think there are two subtleties to note here. First, if a fetus feels pain during an abortion, we would be morally compelled by practical principles such as “We shouldn’t cause pain to others.” In other words, even if a pro-choice advocate doesn’t accept a “sanctity of life” principle, perhaps a principle of not causing pain (and painful death) is more compelling. So this research at least precludes the possibility of that sort of argument, which is not fundamentally deceptive.

Second, we generally do believe that painless death is preferable to painful death, which is why pain medication can be important in a person’s final days. However, it seems to me that any pro-choice attempt to exploit this research along those lines would be somewhat depraved. We don’t use pain medication so that we can take a life, or to make us feel better for having taken it; we use it to make the inevitable more palatable.