With similar federal legislation on its way from the anti-abortion lobby, Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle has vetoed a bill for his own state that would have required doctors to tell women seeking abortions that a fetus can feel pain after five months of gestation. Many laws that seek to limit abortion are based on faith, rather than science; the bill that Doyle vetoed was instead based in outright falsehood. The earliest a fetus could possibly feel pain is in the third trimester, or after twenty-four weeks of gestation–and even that is questionable.

While conservatives often rush to decry science as corrupt and unreliable, as in the debate over evolution, they are swift to rely on it when it seems to support their cause. Anti-abortionists often point out that the spinal cord, cerebral cortex and thalamus–the three major components of the nervous system’s ability to deliver pain–are formed at twenty weeks of gestation, and may even begin to connect by that time. What they do not say is that the myelin sheath over the nerves that allows for the efficient conduction of pain is not present until after a minimum of twenty-four weeks. They also fail to mention that the body’s pain delivery system does not function fully until after birth. Even if fetuses could feel pain, passage through a convulsing tunnel that forces one’s skull to fold in on itself could be nothing but excruciating, yet the anti-abortionists feel that birth is perfectly acceptable for the sacrosanct fetus.

The conservatives who proposed the bill in the first place are simply grasping at straws in their fight against women’s control over their own bodies. Their bill would have affected women who sought abortion after five months’ gestation, even though ninety-eight percent of abortions are obtained before twenty weeks into the pregnancy. The two percent of abortions that happen after the fifth month are only performed when the fetus poses a serious risk to the potential mother’s health or because the fetus is too deformed to survive more than a few hours after birth. The only effect of the proposed bill would have been to try to force guilt on women who had no other choice but to terminate a wanted pregnancy.

Anti-abortionists attempt to gain ground in their groundless fight against the legality of abortion by misleading the public with minute and misrepresented details. Governor Doyle has admirably performed the duty of his office by stopping misogynistic legislation based on lies. If the President is a true American, he will follow Doyle’s lead and veto any such bills that land on his desk.