Does it hurt.................?

In the past few days, the MSM has been reporting on a new "study" that has been put out on whether or not a "fetus" before 29 months of growing within his or her mother can feel pain. The new report says -- probably not. Here's part of a report on this from "The Australian":

A HUMAN fetus is unlikely to feel pain before the third trimester, when consciousness begins to form, researchers said in a report that could fuel debate over proposed US abortion legislation.

Even if a fetus feels pain, doctors may not be able to anesthetise it without endangering the mother's health, including during an abortion, the researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Legislation under consideration by the US Congress and some US states would require doctors to inform women seeking abortions after the 22nd week of gestation that their fetus feels pain and offer to anesthetise the fetus.

Supporters of the legislation say that when a fetus displays a withdrawal reflex or hormonal stress response, that is evidence of fetal pain. But the researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, questioned that view, saying the responses may be automatic and not signs of discomfort.

Drawing on findings from thousands of medical-journal articles on the subject of fetal pain and related topics, the report's author, Susan Lee, wrote that "pain is a subjective sensory and emotional experience that requires the presence of consciousness."

Consciousness is created by brain connections between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, and those do not begin to develop before the 23rd week and possibly not before the 30th week of gestation. The human gestation period is 38 weeks from conception.

"Conscious perception of pain does not begin before the third trimester," Ms Lee wrote. In the US, only 1.4 percent of abortions are performed at or after 21 weeks gestational age, the report said.

Anesthesia is used in some surgeries where the fetus is operated on inside the womb, but it is not done to address fetal pain, Lee wrote. It is designed to relax the uterus, immobilize the fetus, or ease stress if surgical complications occur.

In addition, the dose needed to anesthetize a fetus might endanger the mother by slowing her breathing excessively, the report said, adding new anesthetizing techniques would have to be developed to address fetal pain, if it exists.

Wendy Chavkin of Physicians for Reproductive Choice, and Health, commenting on the report, said its conclusions affirmed what other experts have found, and denounced the proposed legislation concerning fetal pain.

"These laws have nothing to do with pain or pain reduction, but are clearly intended to stigmatize abortion, the women who have abortions and the doctors who provide them," Dr Chavkin said.

Here's the way this debate is being played out. With new legislation in place, based on the concerns and research of other persons in the scientific/medical community, that would require women to be counseled about the possibility of the "fetus" they are aborting feeling pain after 20 months of gestation, some other medical researchers have looked at documents from past research to assure us that abortion doesn't hurt. (Remember, gestation is the first part of everyone's life when living and growing in complete dependence upon one's mother's body in her womb. I say that because such scientific sounding terms often make abstract a very concrete human reality.) GLOBE AND MAIL.COM report the following about the timing of the report.

The report, in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, is being published just as anti-abortion groups are pushing for fetal pain laws. The U.S. Congress and several states are considering legislation that would require doctors to tell women seeking abortions 20 or more weeks after conception that a fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia for the fetus.

The politics of abortion are, of course, very precise and coordinated. So, it is not any surprise that this article in the Journal of American Medicine has come out now. But even if it is motivated by abortion politics (which I cannot prove), the debate about when a child in the womb is capable of feeling pain is a legitimate one to have.

However, this debate is really just a further development of the already existing debate about abortion. The pro-lifers such as me, of course, will be very glad if it can be proven that pain-awareness is much earlier than science once thought. Pro-choice advocates will rejoice if the pain-threshold age is later. The reason I call it a further developmen of the already existing debate is that the debate in America has always been cast (for the most part) in terms of:

1. Is a fetus a human person?
2. Which "right" if most fundamental -- the right to life or the right to self-determination.

If a fetus feels pain early during its life in the womb, then it will seem to the moral imagination of most people to be much more like a person. If the pain awareness is later, then persons can still contend that a fetus is just a highly organized organism, but not a person. And since a non-person highly organized organism is not a person, then the second of the two considerations vanishes (for many). The self-determination of the mother will be thought as most fundamental, since no other truly human consideration is under view.

But the whole question of pain and the fetus really misses the bigger picture; the picture that we ought to be asking. The question is not whether the fetus feels pain or has developed enough to be conscious or is a "person." The question is -- is a pre-born human being one of us or not? The answer to that question is a resounding YES! Philosophers and scientists and theologians and grandparents alike can tell you that a human fetus is, first and foremost, human. It is not somce species called "fetus." It is a human being at a particular stage of human life. Given time, care, and luck most of them will be born and join us in this traumatic, yet wondrous world that we share as the human species.

Every fetus, conscious or not, is the promise of a fully human life and the future of our race. Every unborn, growing human being is the promise of another one of us human creatures. Every gestating organism is the promise of a pain-feeling, joy-feeling, pain-giving, joy-giving human person. So, the real question if, then, what do we owe our fetal brethren, even if they don't feel pain.

The question of what we owe one another is one that is quite sublimated in American abortion politics and American politics in general. The radicalized individualism of the late 20th century left us with a hole in our collective soul as a culture. The predominant question for many, many of us is simply, what's in it for me. From Fortune 500 CEO's with their ridiculous salaries, while companies lose money and workers lose jobs, to drug dealers who sell drugs on elementary school and middle school campuses to father's who abandon their children and a culture that tells pregnant women to take care of themselves first of all: all our culture has forgotten to ask the question what do we owe one another.

If one considers that we do owe something to others who share our humanity, even if we do not ever see them -- and even if they do not feel pain -- the question of abortion takes on a different significance. But, if we keep pushing away the possibility that in this life we owe something as human beings to other human beings, then we will keep wondering about when it hurts to be aborted, rather than when do we begin to welcome the stranger into the fold.