EXCLUSIVE: BABY TALKS IN WOMB!
A new scanning technique pioneered by Professor Stuart Campbell at the Create Health Centre for Reproduction & Advanced Technology has turned in some remarkable findings. Images produced during scans have demonstrated that a foetus can move limbs as early as 12 weeks after conception & at 18 weeks eyes were seen to open.
But the claims that will escalate the abortion debate to new levels of intensity are that at 26 weeks foetuses display characteristics normally only observed weeks after birth. Observed foetuses were reported by Professor Campbell as scratching, smiling, crying & even thumb sucking.
All of which is fascinating & worthy of further investigation. However, Professor Campbell claimed this afternoon in a radio interview that some of these early instances of hitherto post-natal behaviour are indicative of mood, & therefore, of course, of emotion. Unless I misheard him, he cited smiling as an indicator of emotional activity in the foetus. The implications of this are overwhelming: if a 4-week-old foetus is expressing affective feelings then the hitherto unsubstantiated claims made by anti-abortionists that sentient life is well under way during the period within which the greater number of abortions are performed are given substance.
I do find Professor Campbellís contentions remarkable. All credit to him for having sensitised foetal scanning to this degree. It will be of enormous benefit in the diagnosing of early foetal problems & will enable, in certain cases, remedial intervention. But everything that I have ever read or been told has stated clearly & unambiguously that emotion is simply not an issue in the newborn baby. Itís not that the circuitry is not in place; itís simply that the processes of life that provoke emotional activity are interactional & it is only the vigorous interplay that takes place between baby & parents & siblings over time that can wire up that circuitry. Crying in the new born baby is instinctual: it brings about the physical adjustment from a liquid environment to a gaseous one. Smiling is a sign of indigestion. Thumb sucking is a breast-suckling substitute.
When I watch Rosie grimacing, leering, yawning, stretching I know that what Iím observing has nothing to do with sentient awareness & everything to do with Rosieís animal self. I have no sentimental notions of some kind of fore-knowledge in her, or of some precocious awareness of her marvelling father standing at the end of her cot. She is, after two weeks in the world, a biological unit barely more advanced than she was in the womb. I do not feel ideologically confident enough to take an unambivalent stand on the issue of abortion on demand. But I think that there is little comfort or encouragement here for the fierce pro-lifer either in Professor Campbellís physical findings or the spin that he appears to be putting on them.
11:19:55 PM 
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