If A Child Cries in the Womb and Abortionists Don't Hear It, Did It Cry At All?

More fun with stupid studies:

The left spent much of the week feeling Hugo Chavez's pain. But it was in no mood to feel the pain of unborn children. A bogus study's claim that unborn children don't feel any pain at all generated a flurry of tendentiously hopeful media reports. "Researchers: Fetal Pain Not An Abortion Issue; Review of 2,000 Studies Concludes Fetus Feels Nothing Up to 29 Weeks," read one headline.

Who are these "researchers"? Abortion activists, it has come out. A San Francisco abortion clinic doctor and a former NARAL employee spearheaded the article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), an article which asserts unbelievably that doctors can dismember a child up to 29 weeks without the child feeling a thing.

An accurate headline on the stories would have been, "Abortionists: Fetal Pain Not An Abortion Issue." By early this week pro-lifers had made it known that the JAMA article was a propagandistic crock, cobbled together by self-serving abortionists. Yet the New York Times, in its inimitably imperious style of bias, offered not a word about the researchers' ties to the abortion industry in its straining Wednesday story, "Study Finds 29-Week Fetuses Probably Feel No Pain and Need No Abortion Anesthesia."

Probably feel no pain? Improbably is the correct word. If a doctor stabs the arm of a prematurely delivered 29-week-child, will it probably feel no pain? No, the child will howl. But according to the Times' summary of the study, crying isn't proof of pain: the "authors of the paper said that even crying or grimacing in a very premature infant did not necessarily signify pain because such infants often cry at even the lightest touch." And if they start screaming when a doctor dismembers one of their limbs? That must not mean anything either.