A wealth of anatomical, behavioral and physiological evidence shows that the developing human fetus is capable of experiencing tremendous pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization.
Anatomical:
Pain receptors are present throughout the unborn child’s entire body by no later than 16 weeks after fertilization, and nerves link these receptors to the brain’s thalamus and subcortical plate by no later than 20 weeks. For unborn children, says Dr. Paul Ranalli, a neurologist at the University of Toronto, 20 weeks is a “uniquely vulnerable time, since the pain system is fully established, yet the higher level pain-modifying system has barely begun to develop.” As a result, unborn babies at this age probably feel pain more intensely than adults.
Behavioral:
By 8 weeks after fertilization, the unborn child reacts to touch. By 20 weeks post-fertilization, the unborn child reacts to stimuli that would be recognized as painful if applied to an adult human—for example, by recoiling. Surgeons entering the womb to perform corrective procedures on unborn children have seen those babies flinch, jerk and recoil from sharp objects and incisions. In addition, ultrasound technology shows that unborn babies at 20 weeks and earlier react physically to outside stimuli such as sound, light and touch.
Physiological:
The application of painful stimuli is associated with significant increases in the unborn child’s stress hormones. During fetal surgery, anesthesia is routinely administered to the unborn baby and is associated with a decrease in stress hormones compared to their level when painful stimuli is applied without such anesthesia.
Abortion at 20 weeks
Despite the fetus’s advanced development at 20 weeks, the following abortion procedures are the most commonly used:
- Dilation and Evacuation (D&E): Sharp-edged instruments are used to grasp, twist, and tear the baby’s body into pieces. This continues until the child’s entire body is removed from the womb. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy describes the procedure saying, “The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb.”
- Digoxin abortion: A drug called digoxin is injected directly into the baby’s heart, giving the fetus a fatal heart attack. The dead baby is then removed from his or her mother by dismemberment.
Does the Fetus Feel Pain?
Source: http://www.abort73.com/abortion/does_a_fetus_feel_pain/
The fetal pain question is not at all central to the abortion debate. Whether the unborn child suffers pain during an abortion or not is secondary to the much bigger reality; the child is being killed. Quietly shooting someone in their sleep makes you no less guilty of murder than if you had stabbed them to death. Providing an unborn child with anesthesia so you can kill them “humanely” makes abortion no less heinous.
The real significance of the fetal pain question is in it’s implications about the unborn. People feel pain. Inanimate clumps of cells do not. This is what is at stake. This is why most abortion supporters work so hard to oppose legislation like The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, introduced on January 26, 2005. This is why they call all such enactments “inflammatory anti-abortion propaganda”. What would The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act require? It requires that abortion providers notify any woman seeking an abortion more than 20 weeks after fertilization that there is growing medical evidence that the preborn child in her womb can feel “severe and extreme pain” during an abortion. If she decides to go through with the abortion, she would be offered anesthesia for the baby in order to lessen its suffering.
The fact that fetuses can feel pain is really quite obvious. Since newborn babies can feel pain, fetuses can feel pain. There is no pain switch which suddenly switches to “on” during the journey through the birth canal. The only question is when do fetuses feel pain? The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act places a fetus’ ability to feel pain at 20 weeks from fertilization, about half way through pregnancy. Twenty weeks is a conservative enough estimate that even some prominent abortion supporters have conceded it’s reliability.
In the end, the question of fetal pain, like almost all abortion controversy comes down to who you believe. Many pro-life doctors maintain that fetuses can feel pain by 8 weeks after fertilization (about the time most surgical abortions take place). Pro-abortion doctors tend to argue that fetuses don’t experience pain until the very end of pregnancy. Whose testimony is more reliable, those who have a financial interest in the availability of abortion or those who don’t? Ethically speaking, who is going to be less likely to lie, those who believe dismembering living human beings is a legitimate medical practice or those who don’t?
Sir Albert Lilley, widely considered the “Father of Fetology”, and unabashedly pro-life (as anyone with his vast knowledge of fetal development should be) makes some remarkable statements about fetal pain in an interview he conducted for the book The Tiniest Humans.
Question: In the case of an 8- to-10-week fetus, if you apply pressure will it tend to try to get out of the way?
Answer: Normally it would be extremely difficult, apart from putting a foreign instrument or needle into the uterus to apply pressure, but with a fetus at that maturity you have a very small fetus in a larger capsule of fluid. However, as the famous work of Dr. Davenport Hooker shows, in his many thousands of feet of film, babies at this maturity are responsive to touch.
The fetus also responds violently to painful stimuli-needle puncture and injection of cold or of hypertonic solutions- stimuli which you and I find painful, children will tell you are painful, and the neonate, to judge from his responses, finds painful.
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I have been told by advocates of abortion that we have no proof that the fetus actually feels pain. Strictly, they are quite correct. Pain is a peculiarly personal and subjective experience and there is no biochemical or physiological test we can do to tell that anyone is in pain – a phenomenon which makes it very easy to bear other people’s pain stoically, which is an important point for obstetricians to remember. By the same token we lack any proof that animals feel pain. However, to judge from their responses, it seems charitable to assume they do. Were this not so there would be no point in having an organization like the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I for one would be unhappy to think we would withhold from the human fetus a charitable consideration we were prepared to extend to animals.
Question: The question, then, of pain felt by the fetus – it is your personal opinion, I gather from what you say in your paper, that in effect the fetus does feel pain?
Answer: I can only say that the fetus responds violently to stimuli that you and I would find painful. Bertrand Russell once remarked that a fisherman had told him that fish had neither sense or sensation, but how he knew that the fisherman would not tell him.
What the Child Senses in the Womb
http://www.sfuhl.org/e_unborn_child_senses.htm
In addition to its rapid physical development in the womb, which includes, as we have seen, an impressive repertoire of movement patterns, the child’s senses also start to emerge during the prenatal period. As noted previously, the olfactory nerve, which is integral to the sense of smell, is present on the 35th day after conception. The foundation of the sense of smell is established on the 39th day when nerve fibers in the brain connect with the olfactory lobe.
At eight weeks after conception, local stimuli can induce partial closing of the fingers, opening of the mouth, and squinting. And during the eleventh week, if the region around the mouth is stimulated, the child will open its mouth and suck a finger.
The child can respond to sounds from the tenth to fourteenth weeks after conception. Changes in its heart rate, eye blinks and movements have occurred after sounds.
Taste buds begin to form during the eighth week after conception. An unborn child actually has more taste buds than a newborn and probably has a sense of taste.
The reflexes between the taste buds and facial muscles are in place by the twenty sixth to twenty eighth weeks after conception. A facial response was evoked at this time when a bitter-tasting substance was given to a child.
Unborn children may have a sweet tooth. In one case, a child swallowed more amniotic fluid when it was sweetened. In another, the child responded to the addition of a bad-tasting substance to the amniotic fluid by reducing its sucking movements.
We can’t, of course, ask an unborn child if it experiences pain. However, research suggests that the answer would likely be that it does.
From the fifth week after conception onward, pain pathways are running from sensory receptors in the skin to those in the brain. These nerve endings are at least as dense in the skin of a newborn as in an adult. Such receptors appear around the mouth during the fifth week after conception and are present in the face, palms, and soles of the feet by the ninth week, spreading to the trunk, arms and legs by the thirteenth weeks and to all areas of the skin by the eighteenth week.
The development of the neocortex, the largest part of the brain, begins six weeks after conception and a full complement of nerve cells is present by the eighteenth week. At this time the pieces are in place to complete the pain circuitry. The evidence thus indicates that the child has developed sufficiently to sense pain late in gestation.
In a study of women undergoing amniocentesis during the third trimester, the sudden burst of body movements that the child made during the procedure may reflect a response to pain. These movements occurred when the needle either struck the child or the child moved against the needle. In another study, the child’s heart rate increased in response to scalp blood sampling, a procedure that is likely to be painful.