“Yes, some infants can feel pain after 18 weeks in the womb”

I think you mean fetuses not ‘infants.’

Good comment though

“Yes, some infants can feel pain after 18 weeks in the womb”

Marie’s right on the nomenclature and it’s not true that foetuses ‘feel’ pain at 18 weeks.

Foetuses do undergo limited physiological reactions to what would be considered pain stimuli in adults from around 18 weeks, but this predominately take the form of releasing stress hormones.

It’s a purely autonomic physiological response, one found in adult coma patients and in foetuses born with anencephaly who have no frontal cortex at all.

In terms of ‘feeling’ anything in any meaningful sense, that’s not possible until at least 26-28 weeks gestation, when the frontal cortex begins to develop and connect to the nervous system.

I agree with most of this article but I don’t see the point of claiming Dorries is a misogynist. She would have to be self-loathing to be that and I don’t think you are in a position to evaluate her psychologically to that intimate extent. Calling her a misogynist is to try and claim the word misogyny for political purposes, in other words to re-define the meaning in your terms so that you get to decide who is a “misogynist”, when in actual fact, it is quite straightforward hatred of women (and doesn’t necessarily have a political connotation). I don’t think being against abortion means you must be misogynist (it just means you have a particular view of when human life starts and have taken on board some moral consequences of that belief).

Also: “neglecting to see the obvious parallel that for every ‘life saved’ when an unwanted pregnancy is carried to term, another life – that of the mother – is ruined.” Not true unless you think every single unwanted pregnancy EVER has ruined the life of the mother.

I agree with the overall argument in this post but the inflated and dramatic language really doesn’t do any favours. I disagree too with your use of the word misogynist -you can disagree with abortion without being a misogynist. Also how do you know Dorries doesn’t know what poverty is?

A cursory look online shows she was hardly born with a silver spoon in her mouth (or that she is a woman hater) and spent most of her childhood living on a council estate and attending a secondary modern. Whether this means she experienced poverty is another matter but checking your facts for holes would avoid people like me (who are pro choice) getting back never mind the Daily Mail brigade.

Stick to the facts -no need for hyperbole which only distracts and inflames

Nick/Alice,

Personally, I wouldn’t call her a misogynist. I’m far more fond of “devious, dishonest Christianist hack who parrots the propaganda of the American right and and won’t rest ’til her crusade of bigotry rides her to the gates of St Peter, no matter how many people she has to fuck-over to get there”. But whilst I like my description better, it’s not quite as catchy.

If she doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of a misogynist, she comes incredibly close to it. Dorries has said that abortion is murder. Therefore all women who make the difficult decision to have an abortion are cold-blooded, stone-hearted, premeditated murderers who should (presumably) be placed in prison. In Dorries’ delusions, a woman who makes this difficult choice should be placed alongside the foulest, most dangerous and most hated members of our society. It’s not just Laurie who’s using intemperate language here…

Women don’t have the “right” to murder unborn children at 24 weeks or any other time.
As any biologist will tell you a foetus is sentient approx 6 weeks after conception, as soon as the neural tube (eventually the backbone) unfolds.

Finding murders of convenience morally repugnant is not “misogynist”.

“Foetuses do undergo limited physiological reactions to what would be considered pain stimuli in adults from around 18 weeks, but this predominately take the form of releasing stress hormones.”

I would release stress hormones if someone crushed me to death with a giant vacuum cleaner too. The release of stress hormone correlates with the sensation of pain. Ergo the foetus is feeling pain.

“It’s a purely autonomic physiological response”

Yep in the same way that pulling your hand out a fire is. A reflex is a pre-programmed response to avoid damage, pain is the signal that damage is occuring, both are “purely autonomic (uncontrollable) psysiological respones”. What does this statement prove exactly ?

“One found in adult coma patients and in foetuses born with anencephaly who have no frontal cortex at all.”

The CNS is massively interconnected, and pain is not exclusively represented in the frontal cortex anyway, lots of organisms don’t have frontal cortexes but still experience pain.

Matt,

Let’s follow this argument through to it’s logical conclusion.

How much jail time should a woman the woman serve for this ‘murder’?

Should she be in a maximum-security cell, a women’s prison or would an open prison suffice?

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that pregnant women can suffer miscarriages for a variety of different reasons, including age or bad lifestyle choices. Each time a woman suffers a miscarriage, would it be appropriate for the police to investigate each one to ensure it wasn’t premediated or an act of ‘manslaughter?’ Where should the money come from to fund these investigations?

If a child is born with a disability or abnormality, would it be appropriate for the police to investigate whether the mother had committed ‘child abuse’ whilst it was in the womb?

Just curious, like.

Good article and excellent campaign idea.

Neil –

Firstly, there is world of difference between suffering a miscarriage and having an abortion, one is an unfortunate medical event (that may or may not be linked to lifestyle choices) the other is a deliberate, wilfull act, within the womans control. It’s like comparing accidentally killing someone in say, a road accident, to deliberately shooting someone in the head, to you are these both the same just because the outcome is ?

Secondly, I would turn your question round and say if it really is a woman “right” to murder a child on the grounds of inconveneince/abnormality then why put some arbitrary time limit on it – why not let the kid be born, and if parenthood isn’t what you expected, and it gets in the way of career/sex life/travel plans then just do away with it at you own conveneince ??

Some of the demented feminst ranting above about having kids being “the end of a womans life” makes my blood boil, we were all kids once, how would you like to be thought of in those terms, let alone by people who are supposed to be your primary carers ?

I’m not arguing for prosecutions, I’m arguing for abortions to be severely restricted/banned, the legislation governing abortions was conceived (sorry !) in times of genuine poverty and when medicine was far less sophisticated than now, and abortions were never intended be used on anything like the scale they are now.

Is it not possible for the pro-choice lobby to recognise that abortion is indeed killing and for the antis to recognise that in most cases it is the lesser of two evils ?

“It’s not just Laurie who’s using intemperate language here…”

No and I hold no candle for Dorries. But just because your opponent is foolish and nasty, doesn’t mean you have to borrow a few of her linguistic tactics.

It would be possible for Dorries to believe that women who had abortions were murderers without being a misogynist as the women who have had abortions are still a subset of women generally. Besides that, though she might believe it to be murder morally, she might not hold people who have had abortions to be exactly as culpable as “ordinary murderers” since the state and the law currently approves of abortion. In a similar way, I think slavery is wrong ALWAYS but I might not hold Socrates or Washington as morally reprehensible for owning slaves as, for example, a pimp who treats his prostitutes as slaves in a modern society where slavery is illegal.

- Is it not possible for the pro-choice lobby to recognise that abortion is indeed killing and for the antis to recognise that in most cases it is the lesser of two evils ? -

I think that would be progress. Whether it is, in fact, killing (or at what stage) is still in doubt, though.

Matt,

You’re clearly pretty adamantly pro-life and there’s not a damned thing I or anyone else on here could do to persuade you otherwise. However, I just don’t see how you can reconcile your belief that abortion is murder and should be banned with your insistence that you’re not calling for prosecutions.

For abortion to be successfully banned would mean an act of Parliament would need to make it offence to terminate a foetus, and that would have to mean legal sanction (yes, prosecution) against any person performing an abortion or requesting one. Surely without this, you’d just have a meaningless law that’s easily flouted because there’s no danger of any repercussions. How am I wrong?

Matt:

Sentient (n)

1. having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.
2. characterized by sensation and consciousness.

At six weeks? Bollocks…

Main sequence cortical development and interconnection to the nervous system kicks in early in the third trimester and a reflex physiological response is not analogous to ‘feeling’, which requires conscious awareness.

Lets not confuse physiology with emotion here…

Neil:

“For abortion to be successfully banned would mean an act of Parliament would need to make it offence to terminate a foetus, and that would have to mean legal sanction (yes, prosecution) against any person performing an abortion or requesting one.”

No such Act would be necessary as the provisions criminalising abortion in, I think, Offences Againt The Person Act were never repealed – what the Abortion Act is exempt abortions carried out in specific cricumstances, i.e. by a licensed medical practitioner operating within the regulations.

That’s the way common law jurisdictions operate.

There are plenty of women who support misogynistic causes and I don’t think it was unfair to use that word to describe Dorries’ views. As for the hyperbole, I think that strongly-worded opposition is an appropriate response to the Daily Mail-style propaganda that I’m seeing in the MSM. (“ABORTION AMENDMENT WILL SAVE 2500 BABIES A YEAR.” Oh really?) Great post.

UNITY

“Main sequence cortical development and interconnection to the nervous system kicks in early in the third trimester and a reflex physiological response is not analogous to ‘feeling’, which requires conscious awareness.

Lets not confuse physiology with emotion here…”

Indeed !

So are you saying that (without going into a huge debate about the hard problem of conciousness) it is necesarry to have “feelings” to perceive pain ? Insects perceive pain (as in they will avoid noxious stimuli) some biologists argue that plants perceive pain, neither posess what we would recognise as conciousness.
Just because a foutrus can’t “feel” pain (in the wet humanist reflexive sense) doesn’t mean they don’t have a response to it, or that they don’t find it unpleasant. We can’t possibly know what a foetus “feels”, we can only look at their responses, and to me they indicate that they can perceive pain.

Neil – In the past it was the back street abortionist, not the woman, that was prosecuted, hence why women from Eire used to come to England for the procedure for example. I would actually advocate a return to the original intent of the legislation, that it was used only in cases of severe deformity, in all other cases full term and then taken into care (which is in effect what happens now anyway with incompetent working class parents).
We should not be in a position where middle class women are able to use abortions to facilitate their “rights” aka lifestyle choices.

I agree with Katy above.

The language above is spot on and I whole heartedly support it. I’m sick of liberal or lefties saying we shouldn’t use passionate language. Its a passionate issue and the Nadine Dorries camp is peddling rubbish. Its about time they were forcefully rebutted.

My feeling is that you make a better point by carefully and systematically decimating the arguments of the opposition. Passionate language may act as a drum beat for the already converted but they don’t win over new people, and may alienate those on the fringes. Shouting gives the impression you don’t really have a defence, just an assertion. But you guys don’t, you have plenty of real arguments against this silly Tory. It is funny that discourse on abortion is sub- well almost anything (on both side). Bad science-style articles do more to make me consider Dorries with utter contempt than these sort of posts could achieve.