"When it comes to the way adults feel pain, science has borne out the optimistic belief that we are all the same under the skin. As research is now revealing, the same may not be true for fetuses; even Anand calls the fetus “a unique organism.” Exhibiting his flair for the startling but apt expression, Stuart Derbyshire warns against “anthropomorphizing” the fetus, investing it with human qualities it has yet to develop. To do so, he suggests, would subtract some measure of our own humanity. And to concern ourselves only with the welfare of the fetus is to neglect the humanity of the pregnant woman, Mark Rosen notes. When considering whether to provide fetal anesthesia during an abortion, he says, it’s not “erring on the safe side” to endanger a woman’s health in order to prevent fetal pain that may not exist. Indeed, the question remains just how far we would take the notion that the fetus is entitled to protection from pain. Would we be willing, for example, to supply a continuous flow of drugs to a fetus that is found to have a painful medical condition? For that matter, what about the pain of being born? Two years ago, a Swiftian satire of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act appeared on the progressive Web site AlterNet.org. Written by Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, it urged the bill’s authors to extend its provisions to those fetuses “subjected to repeated, violent maternal uterine contraction and then forced through the unimaginably narrow vaginal canal.”"