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Debate Over Fetal Pain Growing More Intense in Great Britain

By Dave Andrusko

Although reports of new discoveries only occasionally show up in the popular press, increasingly scientific research is concluding that unborn children are capable of experiencing pain. Making the conclusion even more dramatic is that the point in pregnancy when the child is capable of processing "organic pain" is being revealed to be earlier and earlier.

A recent headline in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph was the latest sign: "Fetuses may develop consciousness long before the legal age limit for abortions, one of Britain's leading brain scientists has said."

Baroness Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution, argued that the conscious mind could develop before the upper age where terminations are permitted in England - - 24 weeks (except for "exceptional circumstances").

In March she told the British Fertility Society that she had "serious concerns" about fetal consciousness.

"The Home Office has legislation that applies to a mammal and they have now extended it to the octopus, a mollusk, because it can learn," she said, according to the Daily Telegraph. "If a mollusk can be attributed with being sentient, and now has Home Office protection, then my own view is that we should be very cautious about making assumptions."

At this stage of the discussion, Lady Greenfield is not suggesting changes in abortion laws, according to the newspaper, but did counsel caution. "Given that we can't prove consciousness or not, we should be very cautious about being too gung ho and assuming something is not conscious," she said. "We should err on the side of caution."

The Baroness's remarks are the latest flare-up in a heated ongoing debate in Great Britain. In 1997, the Royal College of Obstetricans and Gynaecologists concluded the unborn are not "aware" until the 26th week, because the nerve connections between areas of the developing fetal brain (the cortex and the thalamus) are not completely developed until then.

"The connections are crucial for pain perception," writes the Daily Telegraph's Roger Highfield, "because the thalamus is the reception area for most of the sensory input to the brain traveling up the spinal cord."

Two years ago a Medical Research Council (MRC) expert group attacked the idea that pain perception suddenly switches on in the unborn.

"Such function will not 'switch' on at a particular stage of fetal life," the MRC report concluded. "It will mature over many pre- and post-natal months to produce complete pain awareness."

The working group also rejected the idea that pain perception is largely due to activity in one area of the brain. According to Highfield, they concluded, "Pain perception requires interactions among highly interdependent brain areas."

Most significantly, the MRC expert group wrote that unborn babies "might feel pain as early as 20 weeks and almost certainly by 24," according to Daily Telegraph science correspondent David Derbyshire. The expert group "called for more sensitive treatment of very premature babies, who often have to undergo painful procedures like heel pricks and injections," according to Derbyshire.

The uneasiness spawned by the report showed up in 2002. A straw poll conducted by the newspaper "found many neurologists were concerned that fetuses could feel pain in the womb before 24 weeks after conception."

There are about 175,000 abortions annually in England and Wales, according to the Daily Telegraph.