An article on Belgian euthanasia packs

Not much to say to present this article... I wrote it myself. Thus, instead of publishing it here, I'm just giving you the link to the article. Your comments are welcome of course.

Thus to read the article either click on the title of this post, or here

Foetus do not feel pain... hence no anaesthesia for abortion !

A recent medical study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) established that foetuses do not feel pain until past 28 weeks of pregnancy. Physicians of the University of California say that they found evidence that these foetuses do not have the neural connections required to experience pain, nominally, connections between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. According to the researchers, these connections do evolve in the last trimester of the pregnancy. The important point to stress is that this is an "evidence-based medicine" research, and not the fruit of original research. The researchers, that is, examine a great part of the studies previously published on a certain topic, and they try to derive some overall conclusion.

The questionnable conclusion of the researchers is that reflexes of retraction and hormonal stress peaks that can be evidenced earlier in the development of the foetus are no evidence of conscious pain. Hence, the researchers suggest that it should not be necessary for the women who wish to abort to undergo anaesthesia. The reason invoked for using anaesthetics being that the foetus might feel pain. Since any anaesthesia comports a part of risk, the researchers suggest that this might reduce the risk associated with abortion.

Incidentally, the study proves another thing proponents of abortion have long tried to downplay. Abortion is risky for the mother as well ! It is not an absolutely riskless act as some would like to suggest, in a comparison with contraception.

Here is a part of the abstract and of the conclusions (with a lot of medical vocabulary, sorry for that):

Pain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimulus. Neither withdrawal reflexes nor hormonal stress responses to invasive procedures prove the existence of fetal pain, because they can be elicited by nonpainful stimuli and occur without conscious cortical processing. Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks. For fetal surgery, women may receive general anesthesia and/or analgesics intended for placental transfer, and parenteral opioids may be administered to the fetus under direct or sonographic visualization. In these
circumstances, administration of anesthesia and analgesia serves purposes unrelated to reduction of fetal pain, including inhibition of fetal movement, prevention of fetal hormonal stress responses, and induction of uterine atony.

Conclusions Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester. Little or no evidence addresses the effectiveness of direct fetal anesthetic or analgesic techniques. Similarly, limited or no data exist on the safety of such techniques for pregnant women in the context of abortion. Anesthetic techniques currently used during fetal surgery are not directly applicable to abortion procedures.

Actually, the question of knowing if a foetus can or cannot feel pain is secondary. It has to do with the status one gives to the foetus. If it is recognized as being a human being, then the question of pain is only second to the first and foremost question: do we have the right to kill that being?