Latest news with #foetus
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
When do we first feel pain?
At some point between conception and early childhood, pain makes its debut. But when exactly that happens remains one of medicine's most challenging questions. Some have claimed that foetuses as young as twelve weeks can already be seen wincing in agony, while others have flat-out denied that even infants show any true signs of pain until long after birth. New research from University College London offers fresh insights into this puzzle. By mapping the development of pain-processing networks in the brain – what researchers call the 'pain connectome' – scientists have begun to trace exactly when and how our capacity for pain emerges. What they discovered challenges simple answers about when pain 'begins'. Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK's latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences. The researchers used advanced brain imaging to compare the neural networks of foetuses and infants with those of adults, tracking how different components of pain processing mature over time. Until about 32 weeks after conception, all pain-related brain networks remain significantly underdeveloped compared with adult brains. But then development accelerates dramatically. The sensory aspects of pain – the basic detection of harmful stimuli – mature first, becoming functional around 34 to 36 weeks of pregnancy. The emotional components that make pain distressing follow shortly after, developing between 36 and 38 weeks. However, the cognitive centres responsible for consciously interpreting and evaluating pain lag far behind, and remain largely immature by the time of birth, about 40 weeks after conception. This staged development suggests that while late-term foetuses and newborns can detect and respond to harmful stimuli, they probably experience pain very differently from older children and adults. Most significantly, newborns probably can't consciously evaluate their pain – they can't form the thought: 'This hurts and it's bad!' These findings represent the latest chapter in a long-running scientific debate that has swung dramatically over the centuries, often with profound consequences for medical practice. For most physiologists in the 18th and 19th centuries, the perceived delicacy of the infant's body meant that it must be exquisitely sensitive to pain, so much so that some have had their doubts if infants ever felt anything else. Birth, in particular, was imagined to be an extremely painful event for a newborn. However, advances in embryology during the 1870s reversed this thinking. As scientists discovered that infant brains and nervous systems were far less developed than adult versions, many began questioning whether babies could truly feel pain at all. If the neural machinery wasn't fully formed, how could genuine pain experiences exist? This scepticism had troubling practical consequences. For nearly a century, many doctors performed surgery on infants without anaesthesia, convinced that their patients were essentially immune to suffering. The practice continued well into the 1980s in some medical centres. Towards the end of the 20th century, public outrage about the medical treatment of infants and new scientific results turned the tables yet again. It was found that newborns exhibited many of the signs (neurological, physiological and behavioural) of pain after all, and that, if anything, pain in infants had probably been underestimated. The reason why there has been endless disagreement about infant pain is that we cannot access their experiences directly. Sure, we can observe their behaviour and study their brains, but these are not the same thing. Pain is an experience, something that's felt in the privacy of a person's own mind, and that's inaccessible to anyone but the person whose pain it is. Of course, pain experiences are typically accompanied by telltale signs: be it the retraction of a body part from a sharp object or the increased activity of certain brain regions. Those we can measure. But the trouble is that no one behaviour or brain event is ever unambiguous. The fact that an infant pulls back their hand from a pin prick may mean that it experiences the pricking as painful, but it may also just be an unconscious reflex. Similarly, the fact that the brain is simultaneously showing pain-related activity may be a sign of pain, but it may also be that the processing unfolds entirely unconsciously. We simply don't know. Perhaps the infant knows. But even if they do, they can't tell us about their experiences yet, and until they can, scientists are left guessing. Fortunately, their guesses are becoming increasingly well informed, but for now, that is all they can be – guesses. What would it take to get certainty? Well, it would require an explanation that connects our brains and behaviour to our conscious experiences. But so far, no scientifically respectable explanation of this kind has been forthcoming. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Laurenz Casser receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
Daily Mail
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
SARAH VINE: If the Left had wanted to provoke a pro-life movement like in the US, then this vote was a great start
Yesterday in the House of Commons Parliament voted by 379 votes to 137 to decriminalise abortion up to and including full term. There are no two ways about it. Our elected representatives, the people charged with safeguarding the interests of every man, woman and child in this country, have just voted for the state-sanctioned killing of foetuses that would be entirely viable if they were allowed to be born. To my mind, it is, quite frankly, morally indefensible. I am by no means anti-abortion. I understand that there are situations where the death of a foetus cannot be avoided, or where a termination is necessary. I have no issue with the morning-after pill being readily available, either. Women have a right to autonomy over their bodies. But like all these things, there are limits – moral and medical. For the most part, babies are not viable outside the womb much before 24 weeks, but after that they can and do survive. The current legislation around abortion reflects that. It's not a perfect cut-off point – there will always be exceptions – but it's probably the least bad option. In any case, very few women opt for abortion at this stage, not least because it involves full labour and delivering a stillborn baby. But now, thanks to Tonia Antoniazzi, Stella Creasy (who wants to go even further, and fully indemnify the partners and medics involved from threat of prosecution) and the powerful abortion lobby, you can theoretically kill a nine-month-old foetus – provided it's still in the womb. This is precisely the sort of insanity that gives feminism a bad name. Because, of course, the whole issue has been re-framed as a question of 'women's rights', which it is most emphatically not. It's a human rights issue: the right of one human to life – versus another's right to take it without fear of repercussion. The irony is that part of the reason this is happening is not because abortion is hard to come by in Britain – but because it's become so much easier. Thanks to measures introduced during Covid, women can now obtain at-home abortion pills over the phone, without the need for a face-to-face consultation, and with no requirement for them to be administered under medical supervision. These pills are only safe and legal up to ten weeks of pregnancy (which is when the vast majority of terminations take place); but the system is open to abuse. Before the need for face-to-face appointments was abolished, there were just three prosecutions of women for illegal abortions in a period of 160 years; since the new system was introduced, there have been six. One of them was the case of Nicola Packer, 45, who last month was cleared of 'unlawfully administering herself a poison or other noxious thing' with the 'intent to procure a miscarriage' at around 26 weeks. Packer's supporters have cast her as a victim, which maybe she is. In court, her defence claimed that she was heavily traumatised by the experience of being arrested and prosecuted. But is that really a reason to declare open season on unborn babies? I could perhaps understand some part of this were there still any degree of stigma surrounding unmarried mothers. But this is not 1925. No one cares any more if a woman has a baby on her own. There's no shame or embarrassment in it, no one is going to force anyone to go to live with evil nuns. And besides, why not just take the baby to term and give it up for adoption? There are plenty of childless couples desperate for a newborn who would be only too grateful. Adoption in this country is complicated and mired in red tape. Why doesn't Parliament vote to resolve that problem instead? But also, on a more personal level, why let it get to that stage? These days you can tell if you're pregnant almost immediately after having sex. If you don't want to be, there are many easy ways of remedying that situation before mitosis (cell division) has even begun. Is that so hard? One thing's for certain. If the Left want to provoke a hardline pro-life movement of the kind that exists in the US, yesterday's vote was an excellent start.
