Foetus 'cannot feel pain before 24 weeks'

The Telegraph online leads with the story that according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the human foetus cannot feel pain before 24 weeks. The inference is therefore that abortion is acceptable up to this limit.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists were commissioned to produce a report  by the Department of Health. According to the article...

The report said: "It can be concluded that the foetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation." Professor Allan Templeton, president of the Royal College, who chaired the review, told The Times that research put forward by anti-abortion campaigners that the human foetus did feel pain at or before 24 weeks was based on evidence from premature babies. This did not apply to the foetus in the womb, he said.

A second finding is that the foetus is naturally sedated and unconscious in the womb, leading the panel to advise that anaesthetics for the foetus are not needed when it is terminated.

"There's nothing in the report that suggests any need to review the upper limit," said Prof Templeton.

The review would appear to remove one strut of the argument by pro-life campaigners that the current abortion limit needs to be lowered, although they are likely to challenge the Royal College's findings.

The central 'strut' of pro-life campaigners upon which hinges all other arguments is not whether an unborn baby feels pain during an abortion. The central 'strut' of pro-life campaigners is that abortion is a direct intervention by medical authorities, indeed an invasion, into the womb wherein dwells a living human being which science has verfied is indeed human and indeed alive. This intervention is conducted with the aim of ending a human life which, without their direct intervention would be born alive and enjoy all the rights enshrined in civil law that we enjoy, like the right to life.

As a society, do we really believe that a graphic, brutal (and abortion at 24 weeks is both) and torturous murder is that much worse to shooting someone in the head at point blank range? We might find one murder more ghastly and be horrified at the sadism of the individual who committed the outrage, but the end result is the same. A life has needlessly been ended by an act of gross evil.

I mean, the infamous Dr Harold Shipman, who went around 'terminating' his elderly patients without actually asking their permission probably gave the old dears enough barbiturates to ensure they died in relative peace. Does that mean we should never have put the man inside because he inflicted not pain on his patients, but merely death?

Ironically, the same publication has also ran with an article concerning those terrible Romans, whose brothel site has been discovered in Hambledon in Buckinghamshire along with the skeletons of 97 infants.

Apparently, the Romans only considered people to be human beings from the age of 2 years upwards, so it goes to show just how arbitrary we can be about the definition of human life. According to Dr Simon Mays, a skeletal biologist at English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology, “There is no other site that would yield anything like the 97 infant burials."

So, what did the Romans do for us, again? It looks very much like they gave us roads and abortion clinics.