Abortion, Euthanasia, and the
New Research on Pain & Consciousness -- Part One of Two

Editor's note. Please read both Part One and Part Two and send me your comments at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

I will be out of the loop Wednesday through Friday. I mention that for two reasons. First, it means I won't be writing tomorrow about the results of the presidential primaries that are taking place today in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. And, second, to give you a heads-up that what you'll be reading the rest of the week is being composed today.

A few words about what is being called the "Chesapeake primary." On the Democratic side,  polls (for what they are worth) suggest three easy wins for pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama over pro-abortion Sen. Hillary Clinton. Clinton faces the realistic possibility of going zero for February.

On the Republican side of the ledger, polls show Sen. John McCain leading former Gov. Mike Huckabee in all three jurisdictions. The caveat  [again, if we put credence in polling data] is that Gov. Huckabee's numbers have improved markedly in Virginia, although he is still the underdog.

Today is a follow on to yesterday's column on fetal pain and the extraordinary essay that ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. [www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/magazine/10Fetal-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=fetal+pain&st=nyt&oref=slogin]. My guess is because it was posted late, not as many people saw yesterday's TN&V as customarily do. I've included it as Part Two.

In a nutshell, Annie Murphy Paul does a bang-up job of  giving both sides of the debate over fetal pain a fair shake. In my admittedly less-than-objective perspective, it is impossible to read the essay without concluding that it is very likely that unborn babies, by no later than 20 weeks into gestation, can and do experience pain.

What I did not have time or space to develop yesterday is very, very important. The back and forth over fetal pain intersects with a number of significant medical issues, not the least of which is  the mystery of consciousness.

Paul writes about the work of Dr. Bjorn Merker who has investigated children with hydranencephaly--a condition in "which the brain stem is preserved but the upper hemispheres are largely missing and replaced by fluid."

Yet there was considerable evidence from parents that these children "seemed to demonstrate awareness." Merker proposed in an article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that "the brain stem is capable of supporting a preliminary kind of awareness on its own."

Merker wrote, the "tacit consensus concerning the cerebral cortex" that it is the "organ of consciousness" may "have been reached prematurely, and may in fact be seriously in error."

What leaps to mind? Patients with severe brain injuries who are diagnosed with various demeaning labels such as "persistent vegetative state" and "minimally conscious."

And indeed Dr. Merker's article provoked a lot of commentary. "Many noted that if Merker is correct, it could alter our understanding of how normal brains work and could change our treatment of those who are now believed to be insensible to pain because of an absent or damaged cortex," Paul writes.

Good news, right? Wrong. "For example, the decision to end the life of a patient in a persistent vegetative state might be carried out with a fast-acting drug, suggested Marshall Devor, a biologist at the Center for Research on Pain at Hebrew University in Jerusalem." Why? "Devor wrote that such a course would be more humane than the weeks of potentially painful starvation that follows the disconnection of a feeding tube (though as a form of active euthanasia it would be illegal in the United States and most other countries)."

In the end I am confident that the ever-expanding pool of knowledge about pain and consciousness will work to the benefit of unborn babies, the medically fragile, those with severe brain injuries, and/or those whose brains might not be nearly as developed.

But, always, the first impulse of the quality-of-life set is a twisted inversion of compassion. It remains our job, as always, to remind everyone that killing is never caring.

Please read Part Two and send your comments to Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Part Two