Abortion Debate: Fetuses Can't Feel Pain Until 24 Weeks, Controversial Study Says
(CBS)
(CBS/AP) Can fetuses feel pain? A new study suggests that they probably can't - at least not until the final months of a woman's pregnancy.
According to a British study by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a human fetus cannot feel pain before the age of 24 weeks. It echoes an American study which put the age at 28 weeks.
The new study says that nerve connections in the brain are not sufficiently formed to allow pain perception before then. Even after 24 weeks, the doctors in the study say there is increasing evidence that the fetus is in a state of "continuous sleep-like unconsciousness or sedation."
The government-commissioned study is a setback for British anti-abortion activists, who want the country's current 24-week time limit for terminations reduced.
In both Britain and America, science and the law have been uneasy partners.
In April, Nebraska passed a law banning abortions after 20 weeks on the theory that fetuses would feel pain during the process. Some research has suggested that's possible.
The Supreme Court will likely be asked to rule on the law's constitutionality and any eventual case has the potential to turn the logic of abortion on its head.
Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling which has made most abortions legal since the 1970s, argues that abortions should not be allowed once a fetus is viable outside the womb.
The Nebraska law argues that the dividing line should not be viability but pain. If the new study is to be believed, there is now fresh ammunition for those in favor of overturning Nebraska's ban.
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http://www.silentscream.org/
Note, this film is not for children of any age.
We call it food when it's in the stomach, and crap when it comes out.
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OK, you've got me giggling. I think that was supposed to be a rhetorical question. Much better than my gas & burp. (or fart)
Faye Wattleton, the longest reigning president of the largest abortion provider in the world ? Planned Parenthood ? argued as far back as 1997 that everyone already knows that abortion kills. She proclaims the following in an interview with Ms. Magazine:
"I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus."
Naomi Wolf, a prominent feminist author and abortion supporter, makes a similar concession when she writes:
"Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life...we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death."
David Boonin, in his book, A Defense of Abortion, makes this startling admission:
"In the top drawer of my desk, I keep [a picture of my son]. This picture was taken on September 7, 1993, 24 weeks before he was born. The sonogram image is murky, but it reveals clear enough a small head tilted back slightly, and an arm raised up and bent, with the hand pointing back toward the face and the thumb extended out toward the mouth. There is no doubt in my mind that this picture, too, shows [my son] at a very early stage in his physical development. And there is no question that the position I defend in this book entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point." (p. xiv)
Don't miss the significance of these acknowledgements. Prominent defenders of abortion rights publicly admit that abortion kills. They are not saying that abortion is morally defensible because it doesn't kill a distinct human entity. They are admitting that abortion does kill a distinct human entity, but argue it is morally defensible anyway. We'll get to their arguments later, but the point here is this: There is simply no debate among honest, informed people that abortion kills distinctly human beings.
The problem is, Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 verdict which legalized abortion in the U.S. is actually built on the claim that there's no way to say for certain whether or not abortion kills because no one can say for certain when life begins. Justice Harry Blackmun, who authored the majority opinion wrote:
"The judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to... resolve the difficult question of when life begins... since those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus.?
Justice Blackmun's assertion is a ridiculous one, at least as it applies to the field of medicine. In biological terms, life's beginning is a settled fact. Individual human life begins at fertilization, and there are all sorts of authoritative, public resources to prove this.
Republican politicians don't give a rat's tail about the 'unborn'. All they care is that the sheep keep anteing up in the political plate and voting for the rhetoric, not the results. Abortion rates dropped sharply under pro-choice Clinton and the Democrats, and has continued downward.
Education and availability regarding birth control are built into our societal framework, and the result is fewer abortions. Some GOPers want to hide birth control options from their kids make it less available. Abortions would undoubtedly go up if they were successful.
Onset of thalamocortical radiations does not occur until after 24 weeks gestation.
Thalamocortical radiations are the fibers between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. The loops are involved in the production of sleep spindles, absence seizures, and the control of the propagation of sensory information.
Projecting remorse (angst for personal loss) upon an inchoate foetus is a symptom of human egoism.
Scientific American has a nice article available online titled 'When does conciousness arise in human babies?'
Most understand that autonomic system responses occur prior to the mind being aware of the stimulus.
An autonomic response is passed to the cortex for analysis and processing via thalamocortical radiations which do not exist until after the 24th week of gestation.