Nebraska Bill Would Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks

(Feb. 25) -- Nebraska lawmakers have found a new tactic in the fight against abortion: If a fetus can feel pain, they say, it cannot be aborted.

So they are moving forward with the Abortion Pain Prevention Act, a bill aimed at ending the "substantial pain" to the "unborn child" caused by abortion. If the bill passes, the state will become the first in the country to forbid abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy unless the mother's life is threatened.

If the bill passes, it likely will be challenged in the Supreme Court.

The vast majority of abortions, just under 90 percent, take place before 12 weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

There is no consensus in the medical community that fetuses can feel pain. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it "knows of no legitimate scientific information that supports the statement that a fetus experiences pain at 20 weeks' gestation."

Harvard Medical School anesthesiologist Roland Brusseau told the Omaha World-Herald that the topic was "complicated and controversial." When a fetus undergoes a medical procedure in the womb, for example, doctors usually use an anesthetic.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, six states have passed legislation requiring the use of such anesthesia during prenatal surgery.

Nebraska is fast becoming a major battlefield in the fierce national debate over abortion rights. In the wake of the murder last year of George Tiller, one of the country's only late-term abortion providers, anti-abortion activists turned their focus to the Omaha practice of Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who began to perform the procedure.

In December, Carhart explained to The New York Times why he decided to perform late-term abortions after Tiller's death, saying, "There is a need, and I feel deeply about it."

Nebraska Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood, who introduced the latest bill, told The Associated Press that he wants to stop Carhart from providing late-term abortions.

''With Dr. Leroy Carhart performing and advertising such late-term abortions here in Nebraska, the state needs to recognize the reality of what's going on,'' he said.

In a phone interview today with AOL News, Matt Boever, legal counsel for the Legislature's speaker, called the bill "a modest sort of middle-ground approach to abortion."

But the language of the bill suggests that anti-abortion lawmakers do not see the issue as nuanced. The bill asserts "a valid state interest" in preventing pain and compares the fetus' experience of abortion to that of laboratory animals and slaughtered livestock.

Nebraska has long been at the forefront of the fight against abortion. In 1997, it enacted a law banning "intact dilation and extraction," or D&X, a late-term procedure abortion opponents consider to be particularly cruel. The Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska law in 2000, but the decision was reversed in 2007 when the Supreme Court banned late-term, or "partial birth," abortion.

Dorothy Yeung, legislative counsel for the organization National Right to Life, said Carhart's practice made Nebraska a "logical" place to wage the fight against abortion. Yeung told AOL News she is optimistic about the bill. "We have legitimate laws to protect livestock from the pain of slaughter," she said. "Why not the unborn child?"

Janet Crepps from the Center for Reproductive Rights, though, was discouraged. ''I would hope Nebraska wouldn't become the new ground zero for this, but there appears to be a number of people in the Legislature that are pushing this issue," she told the AP.

The bill has a Facebook page with more than 600 followers. On the fan page, one commenter said he was relieved to see Nebraska lawmakers sponsoring such a bill.

"With all the federal steam seemingly going the other way, it is very encouraging that we have sane people in our great state that will continue to fight for the right of all human beings, especially those most precious ones in the womb," Mike Thompson wrote.

Elsewhere on the Web, however, reaction was not as positive. Robin Marty of AlterNet, a liberal online news site, was livid. "It's a good thing anti-choice advocates don't let things like 'scientific facts' or 'studies' get in the way when creating legislation that affects women's human rights, their health and lives," she wrote.