
On Fox News, a surgeon discusses the viability of premature foetuses as well as the fact that a foetus tries to avoid an abortion.
The left has caused abortion protection to be removed. A medical procedure that should be rarely used has been hijacked by political ideology.
RC Sproul discusses abortion through the biblical viewpoint.
The foetus is a living being that feels pain at 12 weeks gestation.
Neurological evidence suggests fetal pain – https://jme.bmj.com/content/46/1/3
In summary, current neuroscientific evidence undermines the necessity of the cortex for pain experience. Even if the cortex is deemed necessary for pain experience, there is now good evidence that thalamic projections into the subplate, which emerge around 12 weeks’ gestation, are functional and equivalent to thalamocortical projections that emerge around 24 weeks’ gestation. Thus, current neuroscientific evidence supports the possibility of fetal pain before the “consensus” cut-off of 24 weeks.
A difficulty that faces everyone trying to adjudicate on the issue of fetal pain from neuroscientific findings is the intense uncertainty of exactly how the neural activity of the brain translates into the subjective experience of pain. The association of coherent neural activity in brain stem circuits with phenomenal consciousness, such as has been suggested by Merker, has at least a similar validity to the association of coherent neural activity in the cortex with phenomenal consciousness. Coherence and location, in and of themselves, do not provide an explanation for how the underlying nerve impulses, which are inherently unconscious biophysical events, are translated into phenomenological components of experience.
Overall, the evidence, and a balanced reading of that evidence, points towards an immediate and unreflective pain experience mediated by the developing function of the nervous system from as early as 12 weeks. That moment is not categorical, fetal development is continuous and not an event, and we recognise that some evidence points towards an immediate and unreflective pain not being possible until later.Nevertheless, we no longer view fetal pain (as a core, immediate, sensation) in a gestational window of 12–24 weeks as impossible based on the neuroscience.