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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)

#71

Post by thatfrenchguy »

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.

https://www.ucsfhealth.org/treatments/surgical-abortion-seco...

Five seconds on Google to find the answer to your question.

Embryos don't have a human brain when you use an abortion pills as well, and second/third-trimester abortions that are not "the mother's life is in danger" are incredibly rare, even in the United States where people are incredibly uneducated on the subject because of antiscientific religious pressure ( https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/abortion... ).

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

#72

Post by prometheus76 »

oblio wrote: post #58
anon291 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should look into the details of how abortions are performed and what the process entails.

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

#73

Post by epgui »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #26
anon291 wrote: post #10

Given that we are actively attempting to deny the fact that fetuses feel pain, are we really that much more civilized? Citation on my claim that there are those who deny that fetuses feel pain: http://www.healthlawpolicy.org/fetal-anesthesia/

> 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.

There's that, and also the fact that "pain" means something very different (ie.: just a nervous reflex, no more) to an undeveloped brain.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

diob wrote: post #40
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.

Grateful I turned that shit down in 2012. Even then the evidence against it was overwhelming (basically, it makes sleep apnea worse because scar tissue comes back fierce).

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by mike00632 »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #34
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…

We should find sympathy for the doctors here. Administering general anesthesia to a newborn was a terrifying and deadly prospect at the time, so it was much easier to find a way to pretend it was unnecessary - certainly many of these surgeries had to happen one way or another for the baby to survive.

I'm afraid it's the case that most all surgeries on infants (circumcision) are elective and performed for aesthetic reasons. For males it's likely they only time they will go into shock from pain during their lives.

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

#76

Post by Dylan16807 »

rodgerd wrote: post #64
happytoexplain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's the opposite - that, historically, many people (regardless of profession) always generally assumed that certain living things did not feel pain or otherwise suffer for some definition of suffering. This status quo naturally persisted into the era of science until science demonstrated it to be wrong in this case . Should they have known better, sooner? Obviously - I don't fully comprehend what could l…

"You shouldn't feel bad about eating an octopus alive or boiling a lobster alive. It's tastier and they don't feel pain anyway."

If someone is making it up, that's terrible, but if they're basing it on some evidence it's not crazy. Not everything, not even all humans, have the same types of pain.

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

#77

Post by FredPret »

mike00632 wrote: post #75
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should find sympathy for the doctors here. Administering general anesthesia to a newborn was a terrifying and deadly prospect at the time, so it was much easier to find a way to pretend it was unnecessary - certainly many of these surgeries had to happen one way or another for the baby to survive.

I'm afraid it's the case that most all surgeries on infants (circumcision) are elective and performed for aesthetic reasons. For males it's likely they only time they will go into shock from pain during their lives.

Absolute barbarism

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

#78

Post by kif »

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.

What is considered to be the best treatment for apnea these days? Is it ESP, or something else? Besides CPAP of course.

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

#79

Post by mike00632 »

anon291 wrote: post #53
loeg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

No post body was provided.

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

#80

Post by Dylan16807 »

lisper wrote: post #57
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?

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 ha…

> 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.

An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body.

So the question is when those various things switch over, not if.

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