Helping to Change the Climate of Opinion

Knowledge of Fetal Development and Fetal Pain Grows Over Last 10 Years

By Paul Ranalli, M.D.

Question: When does a decade seem like 700 years?

Answer: When one considers the evolution of public awareness of life in the womb over the past 10 years.

In the 1300s, a new life was judged to have begun when a living, breathing baby emerged completely from her mother's womb. This "born-alive" rule was thus established as the first point of a person's legal protection, a standard that was entirely justified and logical, given that it was a product of the best scientific evidence at the time. They simply didn't know any better.

Flash forward to the late 20th century when, paradoxically, the scourge of widespread abortion in the Western world emerges against a backdrop of accelerating knowledge of the remarkable degree of human development in the womb. The last decade, in particular, has witnessed striking advances in our knowledge of fetal life.

Yet the legalized practice of abortion, and the related denial of rights to unborn victims of violence against the mother, holds fast to a legal standard based on the scientific knowledge current at the time of Henry IV: the venerable "born-alive" rule. Pro-abortionists, once admired by the media as the vanguard, now bring up the rear, clinging to "science" seven hundred years out of date.

But a once tiny rent in the fabric of the case that denies the unborn her humanity has now spread, threatening to rip this lie apart. The evidence that the unborn is "one of us" is virtually everywhere in popular culture.

You see it while you wait in the grocery line - - the front covers of magazines which feature marvelously detailed photos of prenatal development - - or as you surf across the dial and run into that unforgettable commercial showing a mother positively captivated by the 4-D, full-color ultrasound of her unborn child.

There are two major advances responsible for a growing respect for life in the womb. One is ultrasound, alluded to above. The other is an understanding of brain development, especially the capacity of the unborn to experience pain.

In thousands of ultrasound labs and prenatal clinics across the country, mothers and fathers undergo their own personal epiphany each time the first hazy image of their unborn child comes into view. In some cases, it is an unwed mother in a crisis pregnancy, undergoing a confirmatory staging ultrasound before a planned abortion.

But how can this be? she asks herself. I was told "it" would just be a blob of tissue, yet there is this beautiful creature sucking her thumb, hiccupping, flexing her stubby arms. And so it goes, as another mother begins to bond with her baby months before the birth event. The odd couple of modern radiology and age-old mother nature combine to trump the received wisdom of political correctness.

Even routine ultrasound images are now detailed enough to reveal the perfect arc of the segmented vertebral column, the beating heart, the tiny fingernails, the emerging facial features. Even more stunning, the exquisite color images of the developing human by photographer Alexander Tsiaras in his new book From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, were recently splashed on the cover and pages of Time magazine.

"Inside the Womb" reads Time's cover. "An amazing look at how we all begin" coyly tiptoes around just when in the sequence we actually do begin. But in a "pro-choice" media world it is a revelation to read an article that leads off with a mother gushing over the natural behavior of her 17-week-old unborn child who, after maturing for another month, would be a perfect candidate for a partial-birth abortion. When the article declares: "Although it takes nine months to make a baby, we now know that the most important developmental steps . . . occur before the end of the first three" - - how many make the connection that this is the prime period of most "elective" abortions?

Less visible, but no less remarkable, is the depth and complexity of the unborn child's early brain development. Even before a woman usually knows she is pregnant, the embryo inside her womb will have begun to sprout a hollow bulge - - the rudimentary brain.

At just five weeks, the smooth brain begins to fold into the familiar surface convolutions that ingeniously add surface area for more brain cells. By nine weeks the fetus reacts to noises and can hiccup. Shortly after, she can suck her thumb. Premature newborns can clearly hear, and babies still in the womb in the late second and third trimesters have been shown to prefer their mother's voice to others, and to recognize a familiar bedtime story over other texts read aloud.

Johns Hopkins researcher Janet DiPietro has shown evidence that fetal temperment can predict a baby's behavior after birth. In 1998, DiPietro told one publication that birth "is a trivial event in development. Nothing neurologically interesting happens."

A backhanded compliment to the complex early development of the unborn brain was provided, ironically, by fetal transplant researchers throughout the 1990s. They proposed reversing the brain degeneration of patients with Parkinson's disease by stripping the midbrains of eight-week-old aborted fetuses of the cells that produce the chemical whose absence is thought to cause Parkinson's - - and then transplanting these cells deep into the Parkinson's patients' brains.

The experiments not only failed, as such unnatural ventures are prone to do, but they ultimately caused ghastly and uncontrollable movement side effects. Nevertheless, the scientists were right about one thing. The tiny unborn brain at eight weeks does already contain midbrain cells that are able to produce the chemical dopamine, which is responsible for some of the more refined, sophisticated forms of adult voluntary movement.

The last decade also taught us much about the unborn child's ability to sense and react to its environment. One way we sense the outside world is our ability to perceive pain.

Over the last decade, the concept that an unborn child feels pain during a late-term abortion went from being rudely dismissed by abortion supporters to being frankly acknowledged by British abortionists themselves.

Anatomical studies in the 1980s documented the establishment of the body's pain network - - the spino-thalamic pathway - - by 20 weeks' gestation. By 20 weeks, the fetal brain has the full complement of brain cells present in adulthood, ready and waiting to receive pain signals from the body, and their electrical activity is recordable by standard electroencephalography (EEG).

Elevated stress hormones - - the same as those released by adults in pain - - are found to be massively elevated when a painful blood extraction procedure is performed on unborn babies as early as 18 weeks. An automatic protective response to pain occurs in fetal brain circulation in response to pain at just 16 weeks' gestation. More alarmingly, newly discovered brain chemicals devoted to pain perception (Substance P, enkephalin) have now been detected in the fetal brain as early as 11 and 13 weeks.

Since premature newborns at 23-24 weeks have been observed to feel pain, even more strongly than full-term newborns, this is clearly the outside limit of when an unborn baby can detect pain. But what is the earliest moment of pain detection?

The above evidence suggests that 20 weeks is a conservative estimate. English fetal pain researcher Dr. Vivette Glover, who is personally "pro-choice," has stated: "I think the evidence is that the system is starting to form by 20 weeks, maybe by 17 weeks."

Of course, the British gynecologists who accepted the fetal pain findings, including that of Dr. Glover, did not conclude that unborn babies should be spared an unimaginably painful elective death. Rather, they called for doomed second-trimester infants to receive anaesthesia before being executed. While abortion supporters have their stalwarts who will not be shaken by such a concept, you can just feel the movement of opinion among a huge segment of middle-ground people, whose threadbare tolerance for unrestrained abortion is reaching its limit.