Unborn children as young as 12 weeks gestation have a brain and nervous system which can experience pain. This has been known since 2020, when experts in fetal pain research agreed that a preponderance of evidence suggests that pain perception does not require the cortex.
This has become understood thanks to research connected to fetal surgery. This is surgical intervention performed on unborn infants in the womb (in utero) to treat diseases and birth defects of the infant prior to birth.
Fetal treatment centres around the world possess the expertise to treat a wide variety of previously debilitating birth defects including but not limited to amniotic band syndrome, bronchopulmonary sequestration of the lung, congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation of the lung, congenital diaphragmatic hernia, congenital high airway obstruction syndrome, fetal anemia, lower urinary tract obstruction, mediastinal teratoma, neck mass, sacrococcygeal teratoma, spina bifida, twin anemia-polycythemia sequence, twin reversed arterial perfusion sequence, and twin-twin transfusion syndrome.
The success of fetal surgery, however, would not be what it is today without concomitant advances in another medical specialty: anesthesia and pain management. Shockingly, prior to the late 1980s, surgeries on newborns less than one month old (neonates) were mostly performed without anesthesia because, their cries notwithstanding, neonates were thought to lack the neurological maturity to perceive pain. Fortunately, in 1987 Drs. Anand and Hickey published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that disabused the field of pediatrics of this cruel practice. They documented the growing body of research that demonstrated painful procedures in both preterm and full-term neonates elicit significant negative physiological changes which also had potentially long-term negative implications. Hence, they recommended changing the standard of care in favour of providing local and general anesthesia to all neonates during invasive procedures.
There was still some question about the need to provide anesthesia to children in utero, however, because the intrauterine environment contains a group of endocrine neuroinhibitors and was believed to provide natural anesthesia to the fetus. In 2001 this question was definitively answered for fetuses 25 weeks and older by Dr. Gitau and colleagues who documented the physiologic responses of unborn children who required in-utero blood transfusions. They found that unborn children who received their transfusions through the placental cord insertion site which lacks nerves had no increase in physiologic stress hormones or markers. In contrast, unborn children who received their transfusions into their hepatic vein, which required piercing their abdomen with a needle, had significant increases in their stress hormones and markers.
By 2020, experts in fetal pain research agreed that a preponderance of evidence suggests that pain perception does not require the cortex. Consequently, unborn children as young as 12 weeks gestation have a brain and nervous system which can experience pain and produce an immediate non-reflexive pain response.
Anesthesiologists at fetal therapy centers are now keenly aware of the importance of pain and sedation management for both mothers and their unborn children during fetal surgery. These anesthesiologists play a crucial role in the risk assessment of both patients, facilitate multidisciplinary coordination, and maintain maternal and fetal homeostasis which optimises conditions for their surgical colleagues
Were it not for the worldwide ideologically driven and hugely profitable abortion industry this fact would be common knowledge. Instead, the masses, including too many physicians, remain ignorant of this. What is worse is that scientists have known for at least the last decade that unborn children and preterm infants have a lower pain threshold than adults. Far from being less vulnerable to noxious stimuli, the immature nervous system of the unborn (and born premature infants) is hypersensitised to painful interventions due to an imbalance between inhibitory and excitatory supraspinal controls among other factors.
Abortion has always been known to be morally unacceptable. Now it is clear that -even when the victims ar just a few weeks old - it is unspeakably cruel. The fight against this brutal injustice must go on until it is abolished. Human sacrifice and slavery used to be "normal", but they were never right. Abortion is just the same and, one day, it WILL be abolished for good!