Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/05/2006 1:20:55 AM PDT by MadIvan
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
One of the bafflingest questions that medical science faces, is who is in pain and who is faking it. If they can solve this question for the neonate, then they can solve it for the 55 year old who says his back is in agony but the doctor is afraid of losing his license for prescribing too much Vicodin. A twofer.
oops, neonate should be preborn
Does this mean an abortionist should give the fetus morphine before sucking its brain out?
Any person be he called Doctor or Monster who intentionally kills a full term baby is guilty of murder IMO.
Thanks for this article...so glad you're here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this study specifically on viable subjects? It's not going to dissuade the pre-third trimester abortion crowd, but it does shine a bad light on the partial-birth-abortion and infant-genital-mutilation crowds.
The most amazing thing to me is that they had to spend money to study this at ALL! Human beings feel pain, premature babies are human beings, therefore, they feel pain. DUUH!
What is "viable" is being redefined to earlier and earlier in the child's development all the time.
Regards, Ivan
Definitely.
Many interesting questions arise with that, however.
Please FreepMail me if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.
Call your representatives and ask them to support the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act (H.R. 356).
A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the Doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. Still groggy from surgery, her husband David held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news. That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the couple's new daughter, Danae Lu Blessing.
At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound and nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature. Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs. 'I don't think she's going to make it', he said, as kindly as he could. "There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one".
Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Danae would likely face if she survived. She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.
"No! No!" was all Diana could say. She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away.
Through the dark hours of morning as Danae held onto life by the thinnest thread, Diana slipped in and out of sleep, growing more and more determined that their tiny daughter would live-and live to be a healthy, happy young girl. But David, fully awake and listening to additional dire details of their daughter's chances of ever leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy, knew he must confront his wife with the inevitable.
David walked in and said that we needed to talk about making funeral arrangements. Diana remembers 'I felt so bad for him because he was doing everything, trying to include me in what was going on, but I just wouldn't listen, I couldn't listen.' I said, "No, that is not going to happen, no way! I don't care what the doctors say; Danae is not going to die! One day she will be just fine, and she will be coming home with us!" As if willed to live by Diana's determination, Danae clung to life hour after hour, with the help of every medical machine and marvel her miniature body could endure.
But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana. Because Danae's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love. All they could do, as Danae struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl. There was never a moment when Danae suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there.
At last, when Danae turned two months old, her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time. And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero, Danae went home from the hospital--just as her mother had predicted.
Today, five years later, Danae is a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She shows no signs, what so ever, of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she is everything a little girl can be and more-but that happy ending is far from the end of her story.
One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ballpark where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing.
As always, Danae was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent. Hugging her arms across her chest, Danae asked, "Do you smell that?"
Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like rain."
Danae closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?"
Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet, it smells like rain.
Still caught in the moment, Danae shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest."
Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Danae then happily hopped down to play with the other children. Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along. During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Danae on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.
As the mother of a 27-week preemie, I have one comment:
"Well DUH!"
What a wonderful story!
Thank you for posting it.
Thanks for the ping and for posting the information.
There are several good articles available on this press release. I used the Medical News Today coverage in my blog, today. (http://www.lifeethics.org/www.lifeethics.org/index )
The functional study is very clear that the pain center in the cortex are, indeed, functional at 25 weeks. There is every reason to believe that the structures, which we know are present from 20 to 21 weeks, mature and function much earlier.
However, the "old wisdom" was that the neonate possibly did not meet the strict definition of pain, and the earliest agreed upon age was about 28 weeks gestation.
Now, we just have to watch and make sure that this knowledge is used for good, when they combine the data with all the pain the babies have to go through in the nursery (as well as when regulating abortion.)
I agree 100%.
Thanks for posting this, Ivan!
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