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London
Professor Roils Pro-Abortion Colleagues
LONDON, OCT. 1, 2000, (ZENIT.org). - A professor has upset
her pro-abortion
colleagues by urging that
unborn babies be given painkillers before they
are
aborted, according to the National Catholic Register.
Vivette Glover at Queen Charlotte and Chelsea Hospital in
London said she
believes unborn babies
should be aborted before their capacity for pain
develops, or anesthetized
if they are to be aborted after 17 weeks of age,
according to the Oct. 1
edition of the Register.
Glover and other British doctors will debate the issue at
London’s Royal
Institution in November.
She will chair the conference.
“I have heard people say, ‘Why give the fetus pain relief
if it is going to
be destroyed?’” she
told the Register. “But we don’t say that about animals
before we put them down.
If we did that to a cat there would be an outcry.”
“I was stung to promote my research after a statement from
the Royal
College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists which said that pain could only
be felt at 26 weeks
onwards,” Glover told the Register. “One cannot be
sure, but there is enough
evidence to suggest that 17 weeks is the more
likely time.”
Glover’s research team came to its conclusions after
measuring the hormonal
response of the baby in
the womb to medical procedures and observing a
marked response to
treatment that could cause pain.
Some 90% of the abortions in the United Kingdom take place
before 13 weeks,
when many medical experts
maintain that an unborn baby cannot feel pain.
But concern has resurfaced
about those abortions carried out during the
next 11 weeks, the
Register said.
Asked if her research had changed her attitude toward
abortion Glover told
the newspaper, “I think
if anything it has made me favor early abortions
before 13 weeks unless
there are exceptional circumstances such as
disability or risk to the
mother.”
Glover’s findings have garnered fierce criticism from
abortion supporters.
The predominantly pro-abortion Royal College of Obstetricians
and
Gynecologists set out its
own case in a position paper written by professor
Maria Fitzgerald of
University College London, the Register reported.
Fitzgerald told the newspaper that “little sensory input”
reaches the brain
of the developing fetus
before 26 weeks, adding, “Therefore reactions to
noxious stimuli cannot be
interpreted as feeling or perceiving pain.”
Ann Furedi, director of communications for the British
Pregnancy Advisory
Service, the United
Kingdom’s largest independent abortion provider,
dismissed Glover’s
research. She told the Register that no new evidence had
been presented to suggest
the fetus could feel pain.
However, Glover’s view has been echoed by professor Susan
Greenfield of
Oxford University,
Britain’s most prominent neuroscientist, who has said
that pain relief should be
used in second-trimester abortions to err on the
safe side, according to
the Register.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former American abortionist who
converted to the
pro-life cause, told the
Register that the evidence of fetal pain is well
documented.
“I have not seen Professor Glover’s work,” he said,
“but the most
comprehensive explication
on this subject came from Dr. K. Annand, a
physiologist at Harvard,
who wrote a paper in the New England Journal of
Medicine in 1985 that
stated that the fetus first perceives pain and we’re
talking about a very
primitive sort by 12
weeks. Nobody has written a more
comprehensive, more
authoritative paper since then.”
Nathanson told the Register that anesthetizing the baby might
well be
ineffective: “The
chemical makeup of the fetus at 17 weeks is different to
a baby that has gone to
term. The gases used for a general anesthetic would
not be able to fix on the
brain, as the chemical composition of the brain
tissue is different.”
In any case, Nathanson argued, the question of whether an
unborn baby
should be anesthetized
prior to being killed through an abortion should
never arise in the first
place.
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