[Old School Hound]

Elizabeth Cannon
@GigiLibby47
·
Dec 23
I was pro-choice until I saw a YouTube abortion video; long since removed. You could see the horror on the baby's face as it literally backed itself in a far uterine corner to avoid the vacuum.  Then .... I don't even want to recall those horrible images.

Few living creatures are unresponsive to a noxious stimulus (for example, a pinch or burning flame). Light a flame next to a fruit fly larva, for example, and it will bend and roll away.w10 These responses depend on specialised sensory neurones, similar to free nerve endings in humans, which preferentially respond to stimuli that can damage tissue. Although the larva clearly has a biological apparatus to detect and respond to dangerous stimuli, can it be said to feel pain?
If the larva feels pain, then it presumably has some conscious or mental representation of the pain. The pain must consist of such experienced concepts as the location, feel, and cognition associated with the pain. Without this content, there is the response to noxious events, otherwise known as nociception, but no pain. The larva thus cannot be said to have the capacity for pain: there is no evidence for the conceptual content that the experience of pain implies.
A proper understanding of pain must account for the conceptual content that constitutes the pain experience. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.”w11 By this definition pain is not merely the response to noxious stimuli or disease but is a conscious experience. The definition further states that “pain is always subjective. Each individual learns the application of the word through experiences related to injury in early life.”w11 The limited neural system of fetuses cannot support such cognitive, affective, and evaluative experiences; and the limited opportunity for this content to have been introduced also means that it is not possible for a fetus to experience pain.


Read the entire abstract here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1440624/