Posted on 03/09/2003 4:26:55 PM PST by MadIvan
Foetuses may develop consciousness long before the legal age limit for abortions, one of Britain's leading brain scientists has said.
Baroness Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution, said there was evidence to suggest the conscious mind could develop before 24 weeks, the upper age where terminations are permitted.
Although she fell short of calling for changes in the abortion laws, she urged doctors and society to be cautious when assuming unborn babies lacked consciousness. "Is the foetus conscious? The answer is yes, but up to a point," she said.
"Given that we can't prove consciousness or not, we should be very cautious about being too gung ho and assuming something is not conscious. We should err on the side of caution."
Last year, a Daily Telegraph straw poll found many neurologists were concerned that foetuses could feel pain in the womb before 24 weeks after conception.
Many believed foetuses should be given anaesthetics during a late abortion, after 20 weeks. Some also believe pain relief should be given for keyhole surgery in the womb.
Abortions are allowed up to 24 weeks in Britain, but are rarely given so late. Around 90 per cent of the 175,000 planned terminations that take place each year in England and Wales are in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Around 1.5 per cent - or 2,600 - take place after the 20th week.
Terminations after 24 weeks are only allowed in exceptional circumstances if, for instance, the mother's life is threatened.
Lady Greenfield is sceptical of philosophers and doctors who argue that consciousness is "switched on" at some point during the brain's development.
She believes instead that there is a sliding scale of consciousness and that it develops gradually as neurons, or brain cells, make more and more connections with each other.
She told the British Fertility Society in London last week that she had serious concerns about foetal consciousness.
"The Home Office has legislation that applies to a mammal and they have now extended it to the octopus, a mollusc, because it can learn," she said. "If a mollusc can be attributed with being sentient, and now has Home Office protection, then my own view is that we should be very cautious after making assumptions."
In 2001 a Medical Research Council expert group said unborn babies might feel pain as early as 20 weeks and almost certainly by 24. They called for more sensitive treatment of very premature babies, who often had to undergo painful procedures like heel pricks and injections.
I've heard of the teaching about "the time of quickening" but had the impression that it was largely a Roman Catholic or even Jewish teaching. (I admit that my impression may be wrong.) I've also heard people say that the idea of "the time of quickening" was based largely on people's understanding of medicine and science a couple of thousand years ago. Some people say that the teaching should be updated to reflect modern scientific knowledge. However, this idea simply puts the whole thing into a modern scientific argument, and those arguments can be endlessly long without resolving anything.
I've heard that a heartbeat is detectable at three weeks, and I have a hard time accepting that anyone with a heartbeat isn't a person yet. It would take a great deal of convincing for me to accept abortion up to three months into pregnancy. Generally, I believe that if a woman knows she's pregnant, it is wrong and should be illegal to abort except in extreme circumstances.
Yes, that's true, and on a forum, everyone can make their argument, and, if everyone is reasonable, we can all learn something about which arguments are good or bad.
In the "field," so to speak, I believe arguments are usually not much use, except when dealing with those rare individuals who really are seeking the truth.
It is more important, in my mind, to show those you personally can influence, the folly of engaging in those activities and life styles where the question of abortion would ever be a personal issue. Why would a woman want to destroy the very thing her behavior and anatomy is designed to produce for her joy and enjoyment? Why would she want to be in the position of having to consider this?
You see what I mean.
Hank
There are only two credible points. Fertilization and the awakening of full human consciousness (which happens at about two years of age). You can talk about pain, heartbeats, neural development, or any other criteria that you want but if I handed you a few dozen example (humans at various developmental stages, different types of animals, maybe a hypothetical alien race or two) and asked you "Is this a person with a right to life?", all those criteria would fail to define a threshold that would be significant in any other context. They are red herrings that are created to justify a mythical cut-off point that someone wants to justify. They are not criteria from which any sensible person would ever start to derive an objective cut-off point.
As for God the abortionist, there are countries and periods of history where the infant mortality rate was similarly high. Does this (A) make God the words biggest infanticide practitioner or (B) mean that those born infants were any less people because so many of them died? Look into the historical (and even modern) practice of infanticide. You may find it interesting.
There is also implantation (on the uterine wall) and viability. Viability is fairly vague but implantation is not. If you say life begins at fertilization then you must be against both the pill and IUDs (which is fine) not all pro life people would agree; which brings me back to my original point, the real question is when does human life begin?
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It is active, but it isn't "functioning" in any cognitive sense and to say so is misleading. Babies are born with very little myelin in the brain; this is most of the missing mass. Without myelin, there is very little cognitive function no matter how much activity there is. There may be electrical activity in the brain, but it is almost purely noise without myelin to control the cross-talk between axons. From the standpoint of cognitive capacity, this amounts to a reduction in actually cognitive function of orders of magnitude at the same neuron activity level as an adult human.
Yes, there is plenty of neural activity. But without myelin there is very little cognitive function possible. As myelin grows in the brain (taking a few years for the bulk of it), the SNR of the axons increases and the total cognitive capacity of the brain increases exponentially with it. The myelinization process is very analogous to linear increases in bit depth for digital systems.
In summary: Neural activity is not a sign of cognitive function. Cognitive function actually scales with myelinization, which takes a couple years after birth for the majority of it. In my book, having neurons that have negligible information carrying capacity compared to a mature human makes them "non-functional" regardless of how "active" they may be.
As for the pro-life movement abandoning women after birth, that's an anti-conservative crack. I'd suggest you take a good look at the Crisis Pregnancy Centers in your area. They are out there and they are ready and able to help almost any woman who needs help bringing her baby to term and dealing with it afterwards.
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