Fetal Pain

A few words on the recently published study on human fetal pain perception.

"Pain" as such requires several pieces to be in place: the message of a noxious stimulus must travel from the site of impact to the spinal cord, from there to the thalamus and futher to a functioning cortex which can process the experience as a conscious sensation of "pain."

The article is basically a literature search describing the current state of knowledge in developmental biology of the nervous system. Past publications show that the first two steps in the above process develop quite early. This makes sense; think about mommy leaning on something and the fetus needing to respond reflexively to that stimulus. The part where the message is sent upwards from the thalamus to the cortex is not quite as clear for pain pathways per se, yet similar sensory pathways have been reasonably well described and they tend to develop anywhere from 23 weeks to 30 weeks of gestation so we could safely assume that the pain pathway also develops somewhere around that time. The convincing part of the article for me was that the cortex appears to not be able to process information (roughly speaking in layman's terms) until quite a bit later in fetal development--sometime after the 30th week. After that time, "brain waves" similar to neonates and beyond become evident, meaning that the fetus is potentially capable of perceiving "pain."

What struck me while reading the article is how little is actually known about the subject. Given the number of abortions, you'd think someone would have come along and sliced up a few brains (forgive my vulgarity) to sort this all out. Also, I didn't quite grasp the political remifications of the study until reading about its media coverage in Forbes today, so I'm worried this might become one of those over-politicized "science sez" vs. "we don't need no stinkin' science" scenarios. My own opinion on the matter is given that anesthesia is frought with quite a bit of danger during pregnancy (you need to give more to anesthetize the fetus than you would to anesthetize just the mother alone), we should oppose anesthesia during an abortion until hard evidence is available that the fetus is actually capable of perceiving pain. That's just my opinion, though, after having only skimmed the article. Also, it's been a few years since I took developmental neurobiology, so I welcome any criticism and feedback.