No pain, no harm?

In a comment on my post on prenatal pain,
Silent Rain Drops asked:

Physicians who treat pain often prescribe anti-depressants in conjunction with, or at times as the only, pain therapy – isn’t this intended to affect more how the patient “feels” about his or her pain than the actual pain itself – or the nociception, if I understand you correctly?

If you don’t remember pain, did you suffer pain?

Hypnotics are used because they relax the patient who will probably forget the painful event as a side effect of the medicine. But, think about people you know who are “happy drunks” and those who are “mean drunks.”

When these protocols are used, we often have a very upset, difficult to control patient who cannot process or control his or her own responses to pain. They may not remember it later, but they do experience pain at the time.

The physiological effects are still there. The heart rate goes up, the adrenaline and cortisone and other chemicals are dumped in the blood.

We flat don’t know the effects on the brain and development of pain inflicted on these babies. (the ones who aren’t killed)

We discourage our children from pulling the legs off grasshoppers or torturing animals. Do we want history to look back on us as a society that systematically allowed the horrors of abortion at all – much less those of the second and third trimesters?