Posted on 04/14/2006 11:58:49 AM PDT by paudio
Why do worms?
Trauma responses are very low-level, far below the threshold of consciousness or meaningful brain function of any type. It is why they anaesthetize even the most primitive of creatures when doing research -- to minimize a trauma response that will interfere with the research being performed. Since they are simply killing the fetus, mitigating the trauma response is apparently not a significant concern for the abortionists.
A response to physical trauma is orthogonal to consciousness or even having a real CNS to speak of, and conflating one with the other is damaging to the credibility of the arguments against abortion.
I am glad I am no longer a fetus.
Hey, I've just completed a study that shows that psychologists have no brains and can henceforth be ripped limb from limb with no concern for their discomfort.
There's a very special place in hell for these schmucks.
The term "pain" needs to be defined more precisely -- everyone is either using different definitions or definitions so vague as to be useless. On one hand, you have autonomous biological responses to trauma, which could be construed as "pain" but which have no requirement for intelligence, consciousness, or awareness in the definition. On the other hand, you have the definitions of "pain" that depend on some level of high functioning consciousness, therefore requiring a significant amount of higher brain function. All animals fall somewhere in the spectrum between the two, largely as a function of central nervous system development.
Any medical expert will tell you that a fetus exhibits the former type of "pain" response very early on. At the same time, anyone that knows anything about human CNS development can also tell you that the latter type of "pain" does not fully develop in humans until one or two years *after* birth. A human is born with negligible higher brain function, so it would be hard ascribe much in the way of high-level perception of pain unless one grants that level of perception to most living critters.
It will be hard to have a meaningful conversation with the medical community until everyone agrees on a more rigorous definition of "pain" for the sake of discussion. Technically, all the doctors you disagree with may be absolutely correct if one accepts their definition of pain, generating all heat and no light until these differences are resolved.
So... if I read the intention of this bonehead correctly, the conclusion seems to be that if the unborn child can't verbalize or conceptualize what he/she is feeling as what the society into which he/she is to be born refers to as "pain", then it can't feel it at all? Utter buncombe, propagated by an advocate of unbridled infanticide!
Which, of course, I had the sense not to read.
snicker
Didn't the argument used to be, "fetuses are just blobs of protoplasm"? Now we're being told not to worry because they feel no pain. Why bother to report that blobs of protoplasm feel no pain? Because they know full well they're not blobs of protoplasm and they DO know they're babies, and they DO know they hurt.
Evil in its purist form.
Exactly!
"He is dangerous."
LOL..true.
Thanks for the clarification. However, I remain confused. The definition of higher level functioning version of pain seems tautological and at odds with commonsense observations. The definition of higher functioning definition of pain suggests that one and two year olds do not feel pain. This on the face of it is absurd as any parent with a teething baby well knows. Also what does "fully developed" mean? A baby's hand is a hand, but it obviously is less developed than an adult's. Does this mean that it is not a hand?
Moreover, if there are two definitions and one is more objectively measurable than the other, shouldn't we go with the more measurable, at least until we can arrive at a less arbitrary definition?
Clearly there are some tricky definitional issues here - but IMHO Dr. Derbyshire's review article remains highly problematic and his policy conclusions clearly questionable and necessarily dictated by his very definition of pain.
horsecrap.
I'd call it junk science, but it's more like manure science.
He's a psychologist.. it's his field to know when someone would or would not feel pain.
..sarc off
Most preemies I've dealt with have been super-sensitive to noise, touch and lights. It tends to be the general concensus their nervous systems haven't developed enough to buffer or "tune out" sensory stimuli. This guy is full of beans.
"Expert voll mit Schiess", Hardastarboard says.
Obviously a grasshopper feels pain as well -- it certainly reacts as though it does. If we are talking about the ability to consciously perceive pain and reflect on that perception, we normally restrict those types of capabilities (at least in our cognitive models) to organisms with well-developed higher brain function. Humans do not fully acquire their higher brain function until 12-24 months of age, something there is both direct physiological evidence of (undeveloped brain tissue) and indirect evidence of (lack of certain types of high-level cognitive capabilities).
Also what does "fully developed" mean? A baby's hand is a hand, but it obviously is less developed than an adult's. Does this mean that it is not a hand?
A human is born with little more than a functioning brain stem, pound for pound, maybe something like a lizard's central nervous system. The life support system, in other words. Unlike a baby's hand, which is generally functional but small, the baby's head only holds scaffolding upon which the brain tissue will grow after birth. This is absolutely necessary, since a baby's head already pushes the limits of what can reasonably fit down the birth canal. After birth, the higher brain rapidly starts to grow and assemble itself on the pre-natal scaffolding. As the brain tissue assembles itself, high-level cognitive function starts to be expressed.
There is tons of very solid evidence that the scaffolding a baby is born with cannot support cognitive function. The most poignant being that there are a number of neurological diseases in adult humans that will effectively revert the brain to something similar to that scaffolding state, all of which are marked by severe cognitive degeneration. Humans that end up in a state like a baby is born in lose all direct and indirect signs of higher cognitive function.
So the short answer is, a baby is born with many organs that are merely small versions of the adult one. However, the baby is only born with the scaffolding for a high functioning brain plus a basic animal life support system to keep the heart beating. This is actually a really neat trick -- it allows humans to have a ridiculously large brain that otherwise would not be supportable via normal reproductive processes.
He's a lecturer, not a person doing a study. He's a psychologist, not a physiologist. And he didn't DO a study, he did a STUDY of studies.
And what did those studies do, ASK the fetus?
On the other hand, I always found it a bit perverse that a woman would kill her own child, but would stop if she thought it would hurt. There are things I do to my children that hurt, but it's for their own good -- like allowing the doctor to give them vaccination shots.
But that's so they can LIVE.
This is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard. Go to any NICU and poke a baby born at 26 weeks with a pin, and see if they "feel pain". Absolutely horrendous. I can't believe that this is even reported in the press as a legitimate "opinion". Nerves develop within 6 weeks of gestation. Nerves transmit pain sensations, among other stimuli. Ask a pregant woman what happens when she drinks caffeine.
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