Roughly 15,000 abortions are performed each year in the U.S. at 21 weeks or later. At this stage of development, humans can sleep, awake, suckle, hear sounds, and feel pain. The most common procedure used for these late-term abortions is dismemberment, often while the human is still alive. This procedure is illegal for slaughtering livestock under federal humane law and is illegal for killing "living non-human mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians" under the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act.