Sir Albert Lilley, Father of Fetology, on unborn baby’s pain
An interview with Sir Albert Lilley, a scientist who is often called the “Father of Fetology” on fetal pain:
Question: In the case of an 8- to-10-week fetus, if you apply pressure will it tend to try to get out of the way?
Answer: … as the famous work of Dr. Davenport Hooker shows, in his many thousands of feet of film, babies at this maturity are responsive to touch.
9 week old preborn baby
The fetus also responds violently to painful stimuli-needle puncture and injection of cold or of hypertonic solutions- stimuli which you and I find painful, children will tell you are painful, and the neonate, to judge from his responses, finds painful….
abortions at 9 weeks
I have been told by advocates of abortion that we have no proof that the fetus actually feels pain. Strictly, they are quite correct. Pain is a peculiarly personal and subjective experience and there is no biochemical or physiological test we can do to tell that anyone is in pain – a phenomenon which makes it very easy to bear other people’s pain stoically, which is an important point for obstetricians to remember. By the same token we lack any proof that animals feel pain. However, to judge from their responses, it seems charitable to assume they do. Were this not so there would be no point in having an organization like the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I for one would be unhappy to think we would withhold from the human fetus a charitable consideration we were prepared to extend to animals.
Question: The question, then, of pain felt by the fetus – it is your personal opinion, I gather from what you say in your paper, that in effect the fetus does feel pain?
Answer: I can only say that the fetus responds violently to stimuli that you and I would find painful. Bertrand Russell once remarked that a fisherman had told him that fish had neither sense or sensation, but how he knew that the fisherman would not tell him.
