First North Dakota has passed a ban on abortions after 20 weeks.

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, North Dakota’s governor signed a bill into law banning abortions after 20 weeks, when an unborn baby begins to feel pain. This comes just one month after he signed landmark pro-life legislation making it the first state to prohibit both sex-selection abortions and abortions for genetic abnormalities.

[…]Senators voted 30-17 to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on scientific information showing unborn children feel pain at least at that point in pregnancy.

The 20-week abortion ban is thought to fit within the current framework of the pro-abortion Supreme Court and stand up in court to a lawsuit from abortion proponents.

[…]Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Oklahoma have passed such legislation.

[…]The science behind the concept of fetal pain is fully established and Dr. Steven Zielinski, an internal medicine physician from Oregon, is one of the leading researchers into it. He first published reports in the 1980s to validate research showing evidence for it.

He has testified before Congress that an unborn child could feel pain at “eight-and-a-half weeks and possibly earlier” and that a baby before birth “under the right circumstances, is capable of crying.”

He and his colleagues Dr. Vincent J. Collins and Thomas J. Marzen  were the top researchers to point to fetal pain decades ago. Collins, before his death, was Professor of Anesthesiology at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois and author of Principles of Anesthesiology, one of the leading medical texts on the control of pain.

See, what I like here is that we have pro-life scientists who are researching this in order to provide us with facts that back policies that the majority of people will support.

That’s good news, and here is more good news from Kansas.

Excerpt:

This morning, Governor Sam Brownback signed HB 2253, the Pro-life Protections Act, into law.

HB 2253 codifies abortion informed consent materials authorized by the state health department, and removes all tax streams that pay for abortion and give tax advantages to abortion businesses.

The informed consent section has an added mandate for the state health department to facilitate medical information access and community support for families facing pre-birth and post-birth diagnoses of Down Syndrome and other conditions.

HB 2253 assures taxpayers are not directly funding abortion or abortion training at the state university, and forbids state discrimination against pro-life citizens and entities. The legislation also includes SB 141, the ban on abortions done solely for the gender of the unborn child.

Naturally, these advances are not going to please people who think that the strong should be able to deprive the weak of basic human rights, but they are in the minority. At least they are in conservative states like North Dakota and Kansas.