There appears to be some new controversy over whether or not unborn babies feel pain, and when. From the article:
A review of medical evidence has found that fetuses likely don't feel pain until the final months of pregnancy, a powerful challenge to abortion opponents who hope that discussions about fetal pain will make women think twice about ending pregnancies.Critics angrily disputed the findings and claimed the report is biased.
"They have literally [literally? -- MW] stuck their hands into a hornet's nest," said Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, a fetal pain researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who believes fetuses as young as 20 weeks old feel pain. "This is going to inflame a lot of scientists who are very, very concerned and are far more knowledgeable in this area than the authors appear to be. This is not the last word _ definitely not."
As I pointed out two years ago, it doesn't matter if unborn babies feel pain.
The real question isn't whether or not the baby can feel pain, but whether or not the baby is a human being with a right to life. If not, then it doesn't matter whether there's pain involved -- we hurt non-human things all the time when it suits our purposes, and most people don't have a problem with that. If the baby is a person then it still doesn't matter because you can't kill people, painlessly or not.
No matter what you think about abortion, the presence or absence of pain is irrelevant.
Irrelevant from a philosophical standpoint, but not from an emotional standpoint. And, like it or not, we are never going to get a strong majority of Americans to stand against abortion unless we can counter the strong emotional motivaion of (relatively) risk-free sex with another emotional motivation.
It's only irrelevant to those who think of the aboriton issue in terms of ones and zeroes, i.e., those who either think the morning after pill is first-degree murder, or that elective late-term abortion is AOK. To those of us who see first trimester abortion is less than murder but morally problematic nevertheless, the question of whether or not the fetus feels pain should certainly be a factor. There's a reason why we execute criminals by lethal injection but not by acid bath.
X: I don't see abortion as ones and zeroes, not by your conception anyway, but I just don't think pain is an important consideration. If unborn babies aren't human, then we can treat them like animals or worse. It's nice to avoid causing unnecessary pain to animals, but it isn't morally incumbent. If unborn babies are human, then we can't kill them on a whim, painfully or not.
I suppose, binary-wise, I don't see a real possibility for unborn babies to be something other than either human or not-human.
That was my point - you seem to be assuming that fetuses are either 100% human or 100% non-human. The former is dubious at best; the latter, insane. Yet, even if we assumed fetuses weren't human at all, it would still be morally problematic to inflict pain on them, just as it is morally problematic (and rightly illegal) to do so to an animal. And as I've already pointed out WRT to executions, there are situations where it's perfectly OK to kill a full-fledged human being, but still not OK to to do so in a manner that unnecessarily inflicts pain. There's a reason why the Eighth Amendment prohibits torture but not execution.