Yesterday’s NYT Mag included a very interesting piece surveying research into if, when and how fetuses and babies experience pain:

But [Kanwaljeet] Anand was not through with making observations. As NICU technology improved, the preterm infants he cared for grew younger and younger with gestational ages of 24 weeks, 23, 22 and he noticed that even the most premature babies grimaced when pricked by a needle. So I said to myself, Could it be that this pain system is developed and functional before the baby is born? he told me in the fall. It was not an abstract question: fetuses as well as newborns may now go under the knife. Once highly experimental, fetal surgery to remove lung tumors, clear blocked urinary tracts, repair malformed diaphragms is a frequent occurrence at a half-dozen fetal treatment centers around the country, and could soon become standard care for some conditions diagnosed prenatally like spina bifida. Whether the fetus feels pain is a question that matters to the doctor wielding the scalpel.

And it matters, of course, for the practice of abortion. Over the past four years, anti-abortion groups have turned fetal pain into a new front in their battle to restrict or ban abortion. Anti-abortion politicians have drafted laws requiring doctors to tell patients seeking abortions that a fetus can feel pain and to offer the fetus anesthesia; such legislation has already passed in five states. Anand says he does not oppose abortion in all circumstances but says decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis. Nonetheless, much of the activists and lawmakers most powerful rhetoric on fetal pain is borrowed from Anand himself.

Known to all as Sunny, Anand is a soft-spoken man who wears the turban and beard of his Sikh faith. Now a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and a pediatrician at the Arkansas Childrens Hospital in Little Rock, he emphasizes that he approaches the question of fetal pain as a scientist: I eat my best hypotheses for breakfast, he says, referring to the promising leads he has discarded when research failed to bear them out. New evidence, however, has persuaded him that fetuses can feel pain by 20 weeks gestation (that is, halfway through a full-term pregnancy) and possibly earlier. As Anand raised awareness about pain in infants, he is now bringing attention to what he calls signals from the beginnings of pain.

But these signals are more ambiguous than those he spotted in newborn babies and far more controversial in their implications. Even as some research suggests that fetuses can feel pain as preterm babies do, other evidence indicates that they are anatomically, biochemically and psychologically distinct from babies in ways that make the experience of pain unlikely. The truth about fetal pain can seem as murky as an image on an ultrasound screen, a glimpse of a creature at once recognizably human and uncomfortably strange.

Though this topic seems to come up most often in public in the context of abortion, it also touches on a wide range of other areas, including circumcision, consciousness and what it means to be a person.

-Greg Dahlmann

Earlier on blog.bioethics.net:
+ Issue to watch: personhood for embryos