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Abortion may be evil, but saying that a fetus is conscious is a real stretch. Babies are essentially born with the level of awareness of a lizard.

And since we consider the killing of babies, once born, as murder, that suggests that current mental capacity is a bit of a red herring argument, doesn't it? If you look only at the current mental capacity of a being to define "personhood" and still desire to treat animals as non-persons, you will quickly find yourself sliding down the slippery slope towards two year-olds. I invite anyone here who doesn't believe that can happen to read the opinions of Michael Tooley and Peter Singer on infanticide and to research the history of infanticide throughout the ages and around the world. Abortion is simply pre-natal infanticide. Is infanticide murder? I'd hope most people would say "yes".

Fetal Psychology

Behaviorally speaking, there's little difference between a newborn baby and a 32-week-old fetus. A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same.

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Fetal Alertness

Scientists who follow the fetus' daily life find that it spends most of its time not exercising these new abilities but sleeping. At 32 weeks, it drowses 90 to 95% of the day. Some of these hours are spent in deep sleep, some in REM sleep, and some in an indeterminate state, a product of the fetus' immature brain that is different from sleep in a baby, child, or adult. During REM sleep, the fetus' eyes move back and forth just as an adult's eyes do, and many researchers believe that it is dreaming. DiPietro speculates that fetuses dream about what they know - the sensations they feel in the womb.

Dr. Janet Dipietro studies the behavior of the fetus in the womb

Their studies include examinations of the fetal heart rate, fetal movement, and other factors in the womb that display the development of the fetus. She has found an apparent period of accelerated neurobehavioral development in the fetus during the third trimester, between 28 and 32 weeks. During this time, fetuses display more mature patterns of heart rate, respond more to external sounds, display sleeping patterns like newborns and exhibit more regular periods of activity. This indicates that the nervous system is forming more neural connections.

She is currently trying to prove two hypotheses: 1) that the fetus responds to the mother's emotional state and 2) that negative emotions and stress affect development negatively and can affect the baby's temperament.