BIAS IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

I guess the article on fetuses and pain published this week in a medical journal must have hit a note. Anti-abortion groups are rallying up and accusing it to be biased since two out of the five doctors behind it are linked in one way or another to abortion-related activities. Life activists claim these doctors should have disclosed this “crucial” information together with their analysis of when fetuses first feel pain.

As if it made any difference. Plus, should doctors/scientists really be required to disclose their politics whenever making a scientific assessment? What’s next? “State your name, number, creed and gender for the record”? “Now proceed and make your case”?

Two doctors out of five – anti-abortion activists make it sound as if the other “defenseless” doctors in the panel are being massacred by a vast majority of doctors with pro-abortion connections… And if conflict of interests is the basis for argument here, then it logically follows that a panel composed of the same number of doctors linked to the anti-abortion movement would also present a biased report…

The findings of the current panel are no news. The report published in The Journal of the American Medical Association merely corroborates facts already known to the medical community for a few years now. Science is all about confirming the reproduction of previously observed information, which in turn is gathered through observations and experiments (what we know as empirical methodology). Independent studies in the last few years have been successful in determining, in that fashion, that fetuses cannot feel pain until they are roughly 28 weeks old. This latest reevaluation and reiteration of several such findings is no doubt prompted by the proposed abortion legislation introduced by Senator Brownback of Kansas.

Given the medical conclusions on this issue, not only of this latest panel but of various other ones, this legislation would serve only one purpose – to single out and ostracize the women seeking abortion and the doctors performing it. Talk about bias…