After four months, baby too big to br aborted in one piece. They have to chop it up..
Isn’t that ghastly? Poor little thing has a fully developed nervous system, I’ve heard.
The nervous system forms between weeks 2 and 5 after conception. My experience in growing cells for laboratory experiments tells me that cells always function according to what kind of tissue they are. Muscle cells form fibers and contract. Heart cells beat. Neurological cells detect and respond to their environment.
In simple terms, this means that the baby is capable of feeling from the 5th week, if not earlier. Is the pain it feels comparable to the pain I would feel? I don’t know. But I don’t inflict pain needlessly on anything, not even simple animals with rudimentary nervous systems, like worms.
What is certain is that the more a pregnancy progresses, the more acutely the baby feels what is done to it. The nervous system continues to grow in complexity up until about age 25 years.