Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987) • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by bpodgursky » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:41 AM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #19

sydd wrote: post #6

It's fucking scary, that this was recognized in 1987. In the 80s and even in the 90s most places did complex operations on newborns without any kind of painkillers -- imagine a heart surgery without painkillers. Not to mention "simple" stuff like circumcision. Also by this time they knew this about animals too. I think people will look at us as barbarians that we ate them when we knew that they feel pain, can sense t…

> Not to mention "simple" stuff like circumcision. You might have stumbled upon the real reason for this seemingly inexplicable delay in accepting that infants can feel pain: The circumcision industry. Presumably some doctors feared that parents would think twice about it if they knew that their son would be in agony (or need expensive painkillers) when undergoing that elective surgery. https://www.endalldisease.com/…

Currently it's cited far more often in the debate over abortion rights.

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

#172

Post by elevaet » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:45 AM UTC

jnovek wrote: post #85

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?” I have yet to understand the historical underpinnings of this phenomenon, but as someone who deals with chronic pain, doctors don’t seem to be aware that people feel pain _in general_. I’m being sort of facetious, but any chronic pain community is full to the brim with stories of various medical professionals being skeptical of patients’ pa…

> then why would we consider the pain of a creature who cannot even directly complain about it?

As a parent of two of these creatures, I assure you they definitely do directly complain about pain!

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

#173

Post by bpodgursky » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:45 AM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #132

anon291 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You're really letting your partisanship shine through. Late term abortions are so exceedingly rare that they don't warrant serious discussion. They are exclusively happening when the risk to the mother is extreme, or the fetus is already dead (or has something like Trisomy 18, which is painful and 100% fatal within moments after birth, should the fetus survive long enough to see the outside of the womb).

They are mostly happening for those reasons, but in many states it is legal through 3rd trimester with no restrictions [1].

If this argument was obvious partisanship, there would simply be a national ban on elective 3rd trimester abortion (as you argue, it's a no-brainer). Yet that is not a bill which can pass congress today, suggesting there is considerable support for elective 3rd trimester abortion.

Congress has come together to pass sweeping bills to prevent far fewer deaths than those abortions (think Patriot Act).

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/what-states...

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

#174

Post by tsol » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:46 AM UTC

natroniks wrote: post #90

lotsofpulp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with all the regulation around healthcare in the US, male genital mutilation is not only perfectly legal, but also legal to be done by some with no medical certifications, outside of a medical setting, and it is legal for them to suck the blood from the mutilated area with their mouth, increasing risk of disease for the infant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohel Can you imagine a new cult starting today that beh…

I'm a circumcised male who has decided to have all 3 male children circumcised. As a Jew, if I may weigh on this, you have my background for an conflicts or biases. Also, maybe content warning is in order for genital mutiliation. 1) It is absolutely not common practice to allow a mohel to orally suck the blood out of an infant's penis. If it's practiced at all, it is only in extremely fringe groups of Jews, not just…

It's sad you have to explain all of this. For some reason casual bigotry is now considered acceptable if it's for the sake of what they believe is a good cause. That's a shift I've noticed recently, as a member of a religion that gets a lot of hate. It portends sad things for our society

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

#175

Post by MisterMower » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:49 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #82

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/

Which fetuses is that a fact for? "fetus" spans 80% of the development process. The nerves that transmit pain don't even exist for a big part of that period, let alone worrying about the ability to process those signals.

No post body was provided.

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

#176

Post by dpierce9 » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

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…

Completely agree. I suspect this wasnt just empiricism, it was also behaviorism which purported to be empirically based but added in a theoretically motivated (and ultimately empirically unsupported) skepticism about using minds to explain the observations of animals. If you don’t think babies have minds and pain is a mental state then this insane position follows quite logically.

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

#177

Post by tsol » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:52 AM UTC

causality0 wrote: post #165

Most people are familiar with the sound of a baby crying, and they think that's the worst sound a baby makes. It isn't. A normal baby's cry sounds absolutely nothing like a baby screaming in agony, which is a fact I discovered the first (and last) time I saw a video of a circumcision. Today we look back and can't imagine how people of centuries ago saw things like slavery and religious oppression as normal. Sometimes…

No post body was provided.

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

#178

Post by MisterMower » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:53 AM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #133

dudul wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I'm not very active in these conversations, but I was always under the impressions that a predominant argument in favor of abortion is that the fetus is just a bunch of cells that has no consciousness and can't feel anything anyway so who cares?

I've met damn few people on the pro-choice side who were pro-abortion, no matter how you'd like to frame it. We just don't trust the government to be involved in this very personal decision.

No post body was provided.

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

#179

Post by MisterMower » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 3:57 AM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #134

anon291 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many women in the US are about to lose their rights to end a pregnancy EVEN WHEN THE FETUS IS DEAD. No they are not. This is simply misinformation. Before Roe v Wade, women regularly had D&Cs for stillbirths or late miscarriages. No one is trying to stop that. This idea only prevails because a large portion of the populace cannot differentiate between a living fetus and a dead one, and assigns the same moral weight…

> No one is trying to stop that. It does not take much searching to find that some states are in fact attempting to do exactly that.

No post body was provided.

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

#180

Post by Morgawr » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 4:04 AM UTC

bobthechef wrote: post #68

lisper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This borders on solipsism. The same argument can be made about any human being. At the very least, we presume there is pain by observing the behavior of animals in response to stimuli and interpreting what we see analogically. An in light of certain reasonable assumptions (like "natura nihil frustra facit"), we can quickly rule out a host of preposterous interpretations to conclude that the sensation felt is painful.…

I think you're misunderstanding what the OP is talking about. They aren't defending the practice, just that it's not necessarily an obvious answer to a question that should not be asked.

> the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that

In the context of science, this statement is a very dangerous one to make. There's many many many many things that people thought were "reasonable and rational conclusions" that turned out to be completely wrong after some actual rational experimentation and application of the scientific method.