The unborn's capacity to feel pain does not add to their worth, but their pain does provide us with a point of common experience and it should lead us to feel empathy for their plight. Our goal, however, should be to stop the killing, not merely to institute prenatal euthanasia through pain-deadening drugs administered shortly before the abortion. Syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran has written, Abortion advocates are going to have to make up their minds whether a fetus suffers or whether they just don't care. Until now they have had it both ways. But now they must either face the evidence or say stoutly that the evidence doesn't move them.
Abortion is a social justice issue, a human rights issue, and a flesh and blood issue.
The pro-choice myth that the unborn are merely products of conception who can be kept at a safe scientific and emotional distance is collapsing under the weight of the evidence. Since pain, the abortion debate has changed. The path of light is the path of repentance for our complicity, direct and indirect, in the silent screams from mothers' wombs which have surrounded us at the rate of 1,500,000 per year since 1973. The path of darkness is the path our denomination has walked with respect to abortion for close to two decades, now, as we continue to advocate a woman's right to choose a painful death for her unborn baby. Both former denominations departed from their historic sanctity of life positions in 1970.