off topic: abortion

I love science. As long as we have ignorance we can argue forever, but science provides answers that are measurable, testable, peer reviewed, etc. In other words, answers that, while never perfect, are better than any others. Many people still prefer ignorance, and ignorance is always the easiest (and hence most popular) route, but for those who want it, science provides the best answers we have. Which brings us to abortion.

Abortion is one of those apparently intractable problems, because people have very strong feelings on both sides of the debate. Enter science to shine a light. (This weeks' New Scientist has a very good article on the topic, but the only online source I have found is an anti-abortion site that attempts to rubbish the findings.) The latest research shows that unborn babies do not have the physical structures to feel pain before 28 weeks. Those paths simply do not exist. This is not an opinion, it is a measurable fact.

This does not answer every other question - there is still doubt over whether pain can be experienced after that point (though all the evidence suggests that those pain pathways are not put to use until after birth). There is also the question of why an unborn baby will move away from a needle. But even a single celled organism can move away from a stimulus, so that does not imply any higher functions. There are plenty of questions, but one by one they are being answered. Critics point out that pain receptors grow in the skin before 28 weeks, but this does not change the fact that the message cannot reach the brain.

We can argue against abortion on many other grounds, but on the question of "does the baby's brain feel pain before 28 weeks" the debate is over. The debate needs to move on to other topics.