Every day across North America, thousands of babies are aborted in the womb. And every day, as we go about our work, children in the womb die horribly painful deaths, their last moments filled with unspeakable agony. And yet, the fact that babies are “tortured to death in the womb,” as one pro-life activist put it, scarcely makes a ripple in the daily news cycle—even when a stunning new study reveals that many of the assumptions regularly parroted in the media are wrong. From The Blaze:

Medical consensus has believed that unborn babies do not feel pain until the middle or end of the second trimester, 20 to 24 weeks. But newly published medical research indicates that unborn babies can feel pain much sooner.

The new research indicates that unborn babies can feel “something like pain” as early as 13 weeks, pro-choice British pain expert Stuart Derbyshire — who has previously consulted Planned Parenthood — and American Dr. John Bockmann told the Daily Mail. The new evidence is so telling, in fact, that Derbyshire and Bockmann say ignoring the evidence “flirts with a moral recklessness that we are motivated to avoid.”

The strong statement comes despite a 2006 declaration by Derbyshire in the British Medical Journal that not informing women seeking abortions about the potential pain their unborn child will experience is “sound policy based on good evidence that fetuses cannot experience pain.”

Previously, medical experts thought younger unborn babies could not feel pain because the cerebral cortex, which controls sensory information and the nervous system, is not sufficiently developed until about 24 weeks. However, one recently medical study discovered that an adult with an “extensively damaged” cerebral cortex could still feel pain, according to the Daily Mail.

“Given the evidence that the fetus might be able to experience something like pain during later abortions, it seems reasonable that the clinical team and the pregnant woman are encouraged to consider fetal analgesia [pain relief],” the doctors said.

The implications of the new research are significant because abortion limits are often built on the belief that unborn babies do not feel pain until 24 weeks. If the findings are confirmed — that unborn babies feel pain as early as the beginning of the second trimester — new abortion regulations to protect unborn life could be implemented around the world.

That conclusion is probably too optimistic—I think that most abortion activists simply do not care. Considering the horror stories that have been leaking out of the abortion industry with little fanfare for decades, the media doesn’t, either. They have sustained a coverup for too long (The Guardian ends all of its stories on abortion with a little postscript informing the reader that abortion is a human right), and that is precisely why so few news outlets bothered to cover this explosive story.

What an awful reflection on what we have become.