Re "Does a fetus feel pain"?

I am reminded of the "anti-vivisection" movement/fight of Victorian times (the 19th Century's version of "stop animal experimentation" activists).

(Background: "Vivisection" refers to the dissection of living animals, a common occurrence in animal research of the time. The "anti-vivisectionists" opposed this practice as animal cruelty, and eventually won their point. Central to this fight was "does an animal feel pain?")

The Scientific Establishment of the time worked from the Cartesian viewpoint that animals were simply biological machines without consciousness, just stimulus-response reflexes and could not possibly feel pain because a stimulus-response automaton cannot feel at all.

"See how the blind reflexes produce such a convincing simulation of agony in the automaton. If We Didn't Know Better, we might think the animal is actually feeling pain while being vivisected."

Mr. Macomber's pseudo scientific treatment of the fetal pain issue is typical of most conservative dogmatists of his stripe. As an adamantly pro choice citizen I cannot understand how anti abortionists can almost universally conflate the issue of late term abortion with the much more often practiced early stage abortion procedures. Obviously it is just a feeble attempt at masking their religiously motivated objections to the entire concept of abortion. This is an unbridgeable gap between the religious and secular elements of our society and I do not begrudge anti abortionists their holy rolling anger, however I do ask that they not distort the fundamental nature of the argument by focusing on the peripheral questions surrounding the legality of abortion (see partial birth abortion ban).

Despite my pro choice stance, I agree with Macomber insofar as he condemns the immorality of destroying what is likely a sentient human being in the late stages of development-I think such procedures should be made illegal. However, I will never understand how he can lay claim to the mantle of "libertarianism" when he is trying to undermine one of our most celebrated constitutional freedoms by presuming a christian ascendancy over women's bodies.