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Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

nytimes.com

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Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#51

Post by Spoom »

anonu wrote: post #5
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

This is, I believe, one of the downsides of empiricism and the fixation on citation rather than observation and reason. The idea that a whole profession came to reject the idea that infants are able to feel pain is astonishing, especially considering anyone who has ever taken care of infants knows that these little human beings react to things which are known to be painful. Babies feeling pain is something that shoul…

True. Lobotomies used to be common practice as well. Even a surgery performed recently, UPPP, for treating sleep apnea is "no longer recommended"... It was only five or ten years ago where they would perform this incredibly invasive surgery, but enough research shows they're not that effective.

I get the impression that a lot of gynecological care is in the same realm, but I don't have the equipment to have first hand anecdotal evidence. Heard many a horror story about IUD placement / removal, where folks were told that a Tylenol would be enough.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#52

Post by BitwiseFool »

lisper wrote: post #48
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

This is, I believe, one of the downsides of empiricism and the fixation on citation rather than observation and reason. The idea that a whole profession came to reject the idea that infants are able to feel pain is astonishing, especially considering anyone who has ever taken care of infants knows that these little human beings react to things which are known to be painful. Babies feeling pain is something that shoul…

> Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it? We need to be careful here. Just because a system responds to painful stimulus does not necessarily mean that it "feels pain". Consider this: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/google-places-engine... Or this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-con... Or this: https://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html People tend to…

>"People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring."

I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#53

Post by anon291 »

loeg wrote: post #32
rootusrootus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't answer that. I know the basic statistics, as it was not long ago a question my wife and I sought out the answers to, but I don't know anything deeper about medical policies. I suspect that answer is probably some version of no. Aren't most abortions just induced miscarriages anyway?

Yeah, and miscarriage itself is just the lay terminology for a spontaneous abortion.

A miscarriage / stillbirth isn't the same occurence as an intentional abortion, because if you intend to end a fetal life, you must also take care to make sure the ending is humane.

People die naturally in ways we would never allow a person to do intentionally (assisted suicide does not mean you get to assist someone to die in any way possible)

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#54

Post by rootusrootus »

anon291 wrote: post #47
rootusrootus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but when it comes to macro policy they should be weighted appropriately.

I typically agree, but not when it comes to this. Very few percentage of Americans are executed, but we all agree that the way in which they are ought to be humane, for some definition of humane. Most people today seem to agree that 'painless' is a desirable property. So if it's true fetuses feel pain past some time in pregnancy, then I think it's imperative than anesthesia is used, and that medicine create such a th…

At the risk of running way off into a tangent...

> we all agree that the way in which they are ought to be humane

Do we? As far as I can tell, the currently accepted execution protocol (for lethal injection) is more about ensuring that the execution looks painless, and only secondarily about whether or not it is in fact painless.

We don't use drugs to paralyze muscles and stop the heart when we humanely euthanize someone, why do we do this for executions?

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#55

Post by ibejoeb »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #52
lisper wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it? We need to be careful here. Just because a system responds to painful stimulus does not necessarily mean that it "feels pain". Consider this: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/google-places-engine... Or this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-con... Or this: https://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html People tend to…

>"People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring." I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?

It doesn't even make sense. What would it mean to anthropomorphize a human? It is a given and can't be fairly characterized like that. The only way to characterize it otherwise is to dehumanize.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#57

Post by lisper »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #52
lisper wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Babies feeling pain is something that should be self-evident, shouldn't it? We need to be careful here. Just because a system responds to painful stimulus does not necessarily mean that it "feels pain". Consider this: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/google-places-engine... Or this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-con... Or this: https://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html People tend to…

>"People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring." I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?

That's a fair question. And I'm not saying it is wrong, only that it might be. Let me give a slightly less fraught example: we have an instinct to "honor our dead" and not to "desecrate their bodies." Does that make sense? The dead person doesn't care. Does it even make sense to talk about a dead "person"? One might argue that no dead thing can be a person, it's just a (dead) thing that was once a person and still happens to look like a person but isn't actually a person any more.

Likewise, a baby may look like a person, may even behave in some ways like a person, but not yet actually be one.

Again I have to emphasize: I am not saying this is the case, only that it is a possibility that needs to be taken into account when doing the moral calculus.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#58

Post by oblio »

anon291 wrote: post #50
PretzelPirate wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that we are actively attempting to deny the fact that fetuses feel pain, are we really that much more civilized? I don’t believe the discussion has been around whether a fetus feels pain or not, but around whether the fetus takes priority over the woman it is in.

Quoted post unavailable.

Is this a real cause for concern? I don't really know how abortions are performed, but doesn't the fetus die quickly? I imagine that once it's "unplugged", depending on its age, it's seconds to a minute from death.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#59

Post by saurik »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #23
anonu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Lobotomies used to be common practice as well. Even a surgery performed recently, UPPP, for treating sleep apnea is "no longer recommended"... It was only five or ten years ago where they would perform this incredibly invasive surgery, but enough research shows they're not that effective.

You are proving the OP's point. Cutting off your uvula? It sounds insane to me, and I wouldn't have the procedure even if a doctor recommended it to me. There are so many totally insane medical practices that it's shocking we don't question the medical industry as a rule of thumb. Another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_infection_theory

> You are proving the OP's point.

That would seem to be why they left the comment, so: mission successful.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#60

Post by drpyser22 »

ibejoeb wrote: post #55
BitwiseFool wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring." I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?

It doesn't even make sense. What would it mean to anthropomorphize a human? It is a given and can't be fairly characterized like that. The only way to characterize it otherwise is to dehumanize.

I guess the word "anthropomorphise" here is conflating many understanding of "human" and humanity. In the same way, is a bunch of cells, an embryon or just a tissue sample, a human? Is an organ a human? Is a developing fetus a human? How many properties do each share with a typical example of a human? There's a spectrum of biological complexity and other attributes we associate with the idea of "human". The question then is where does a baby fit on that spectrum.

The general idea of anthropomorphising, here, is to attribute characteristics and experience that we only know from our own experience as conscious, self-aware creatures capable of complex cognition and complex communication of that experience.

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