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.
Those that can do this are consciousless monsters. And to think of the infant, lying in his/her mothers body, to have this done. There are countless people lined up to adopt unwanted babies, why can't they be allowed to live and given to others?
One of the biggest part of the problem, IMO, is that information isn't given to the mothers, information like your pictures.I had a friend who had a 3 month abortion, the baby was economically inconvenient and her husband wanted the abortion. She was fed the lie that "it's just a piece of tissue", and believed it, until she saw the little hands, feet and other body parts being thrown into a bucket. I've heard other women say the say thing. They just believed the lie that it wasn't really a living baby. Dumb? Yes, but it was so convenient at the time, and the baby "wasn't real yet". And then many of them have the heartbreak afterwards, when they realize the truth.
What say Ye, abortionists!
I don't think that unborn children are building permanent memories of the kind that you mention. If you can still place something that happened to you at age 2, you are doing much better than I am. When I spoke of unborn children developing memories, I meant that they learn their mother's voice and things of that nature. Some studies have also suggested that children are capable of intellectual learning in the womb. Again, I don't think anyone will ever have a conscious memory of a fact learned in the womb, but I can believe that positive influences would build some foundation for learning.
Apparently, but it's nothing to be ashamed of, and can be corrected.
Here, let me help you out. Since this is only a forum, some brevity is usually in order. Since you ignore context, I could have said, "The development of the brain, alone, does not determine consciousness, because even fully developed brains are not necessarily conscious and frequently are not."
Does that help?
Hank
Smell Of Rain: The story of Danae comforted on God's chest
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.
If your premise is that consciousness is an emergent quality of the brain or, "brain activity," your argument might succeed, but even the assumption that Consciousness could be a subset of the Brain Development superset has no objective basis and is unsupported.
Since consciousness is non-demonstrable, (there is no objective evidence of any consciouness, and we only known are own because we are conscious), there is no reason to suppose it is an emergent quality in the first place.
Hank
However, I remain pretty skeptical about prenatal consciousness, since there doesn't really seem to be a whole lot of postnatal consciousness for several months. I guess it all comes down to how you want to define it.
Well, anything is possible, but this much is certain, it is absolutely impossible to objectively know, not only if the unborn are conscious, but if any living creature in the world is. Consciousness in others is assumed on the basis of their testimony (but a very clever machine that appeared to be human could be made to make the same claim). In animals, it is presumed, because their behavior is what we would expect if they were conscious. As for evidence of the consciousness itself, since in all creatures it is a subective experience, their is no evidence. The only consciousness you will ever know is your own.
It is bad science to attribute behavior to something when all that behavior can be explained without that attribution, and the thing it is being attributed to can never be known.
Of course, scientists with an agenda, often are less rigorous than they ought to be.
Hank
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.