Abortion Activists Admit a Child in the Womb is a “Baby,” Agree She Feels Pain

The organization Reproductive Freedom for All, previously called NARAL, is so extreme that it opposes laws that would make it a crime to kill a baby who has been born alive during a botched abortion. I wrote about this in a previous Substack article.

Acknowledging the Humanity of an Unborn Child

But in 2015, Reproductive Freedom for All, then known as NARAL, sent out an official fundraising letter that referred to a child in the womb as a “baby” and even implied that the baby can feel pain, a claim pro-choice activists constantly deny.

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A woman named Dana Weinstein wrote NARAL’s letter. It asked for donations to fight the bill HR 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would have banned abortions after 20 weeks.

The letter said:

When I was more than 20 weeks pregnant, my doctor discovered our baby had horrifying severe fetal anomalies that could not have been discovered earlier in pregnancy. If I’d carried our wanted and loved baby to term, she would have survived only for a short time, in a world of immense suffering. So, we chose to end our baby’s pain…

Had our baby been viable, we would have done anything, everything. She was not.

The letter uses the term “baby” to describe the preborn child not once, but three times.

Do Babies in the Womb Feel Pain?

To say that an abortion would “end our baby’s pain” implies that the baby was in pain in the womb. Pro-choice people nearly always deny that babies in the womb feel pain.

Surgical methods of abortion in the first and second trimester tear preborn children apart, violently, limb from limb. A child in the womb develops fingers and toes between seven and eight weeks after conception. At this stage or later, a surgical abortion leaves a pile of recognizable body parts.

If a baby can suffer in the womb from a medical condition, he or she can definitely suffer while being dismembered.

Notably, Weinstein wanted her baby and valued her. No doubt, NARAL wouldn’t call an unwanted preborn child a “baby.” They would label her a “fetus,” “tissue,” “a pregnancy,” or some other dehumanizing term.

Learn more about surgical abortion methods in the videos at

Wanted vs. Unwanted Children

It may be unusual for a pro-abortion group to refer to a child in the womb as a “baby,” but many pro-choice people, even activists, have regarded their own, wanted preborn children as babies, and called them babies, even while denying the humanity of other preborn babies.

But it is illogical to assume that a baby in the womb whose mother wants her is a person, but an unwanted child in the womb isn’t. Our opinion of something or someone, and whether we value them, doesn’t change who or what they are.

A human being is a human being, regardless of how someone else feels about them. We aren’t human beings because our mothers believe we are. We are human beings because of our very nature. It’s written into our DNA. This doesn’t change based on the whims of our parents.

Most of us care a great deal what our parents think of us, or at least, we do when we are children. But their perceptions of us don’t determine our value, much less our nature, or our identity as human beings.

A person, whether a preborn baby, newborn, child, or adult, is a person and has value whether or not their mother values them.

Nevertheless, some pro-abortion activists and writers have attempted to justify this position. In my next Substack article, I will give examples of this and refute their claims.

LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.