A Lame Duck Parting Shot: Try to Legislate Science
December 7, 2006
(Washington, DC, December 7, 2006) The American Humanist Association
expressed its scorn today for the majority of House members who voted last
night to pass the "fetal pain" bill. The vote was 250 to 162, though this
wasn't the two-thirds majority needed to send it to the Senate during this
lame-duck session of Congress.
"This bill stands as a symbol of what the 109th Congress was and shows one
reason why the American people threw the bums out," said Mel Lipman,
president of the American Humanist Association. "As we’ve seen repeatedly
from the Bush administration, this is nothing less than an attempt to
legislate science, to make political dogma an arbiter of nature's facts."
The wording of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, HR 6099, introduced by
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., declares a 20-week-old fetus to be a "pain-capable
unborn child." This proposition is seriously doubted by most scientists, who
believe that synaptic connections in the brain are necessary to perceive
pain--connections formed well after the 20th week of a pregnancy. In
addition, the bill's language is ideologically charged and sensationalist,
stating that "the process of being killed in an abortion will cause the
unborn child pain."
Moreover, because the bill would have required abortion providers to
"inform" pregnant women of this and offer fetal anesthesia, it would have
institutionalized a controversial claim as established science. "The
American Humanist Association has always supported the goal of helping
people make informed decisions," said Lipman. "But using emotionally-charged
language and citing largely unsupported data to ‘inform’ is usually called
propaganda."
"The Soviet Union tried to legislate science from the 1930s to the 1960s,
and with disastrous results," said AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt.
"For example, the adoption of Lysenkoism in opposition to Mendelian genetics
led to the failure of Soviet harvests. We had hoped that U.S. politicians
had learned from the failed Soviet system not to try to dictate scientific
conclusions."
"But in a way, maybe this is a good thing," added Lipman. "This pathetic
attempt, which thankfully goes nowhere, might show the public the true
colors of those who have been leading this nation over the past six years.
May we never make such a mistake again."
