The unborn listen and learn

The pro-choice position that the fetus is a blank slate, with no feelings or thoughts until birth, may be challenged by bird studies that show the unborn can listen and learn.

In “Pecking Order” by Rivka Galchen in the October 21 issue of The New Yorker, we discover that tiny fairy wrens communicate with their young who are still in the eggs. “The mothers in nests were producing an incubation call—a call to the eggs,” said bird ecologist Sonia Kleindorfer. After birth, each chick’s “begging call” matched an element from the incubation call.

Per the author: This suggested, startlingly, that birds learn a literal mother tongue while still in ovo. (Humans do this, too; French and German babies have distinct cries.) Even “foster” chicks, who as eggs were physically moved from one nest to another, learned begging calls from their foster mothers, rather than from their genetic mothers.

The mother-to-unborn communication was even more remarkable considering that the fairy wren egg is smaller than a thumbnail and songbird embryos do not have well-developed ears. Can we continue to dismiss the much larger human fetus as being just a bunch of cells with no feelings, thoughts, or capacity to absorb information from the outside world?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/how-scientists-started-to-decode-birdsong

 

I'm sure the fetus can feel pain just like an animal. And that there is also a latent capacity for thoughts and emotions.The argument is that it doesn't have a higher consciousness yet.

 

for humans


http://www.slate.com/id/2120872/
"a member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, describes in his book The Ethical Brain, current neurology suggests that a fetus doesn't possess enough neural structure to harbor consciousness until about 26 weeks, when it first seems to react to pain. Before that, the fetal neural structure is about as sophisticated as that of a sea slug and its EEG as flat and unorganized as that of someone brain-dead."

 

This is a red herring. Show me where this is happening in the early development of the chick, with the egg being kept from the parent bird in the later part of development. The pro-choice position already acknowledges how the fetus is developed in the later stages, and is why most are good with the viability point save in medical emergency situations. Bu it still does not touch on the bodily autonomy issue that is the basis of our argument. And for that matter, if human women gave birth through eggs (not as the gamete), then there would not be an issue as then the developing offspring would not be in her body and it would not be a bodily autonomy issue.

 

“Pain” is more complex that people think as some reactions to noxious stimuli do not route through then brain but have a “spinal reflex” bypassing the brain. Have you ever touched something hot pulled away and THEN said “ouch!”

 

I would like a link to the original research please and not some speculative piece in a magazine. Having said that it has long been known that one of the more “primitive” area of the brain is hearing. I saw research some years back that indicated patients diagnosed as brain dead would show an alteration in vital signs when someone they knew talked
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200708105935.htm
hearing is the last sense to ‘go’

 

Never a good idea to begin with strawman fallacy --- that is not the "Pro-choice position" .. certainly not the position of science .. and the comment itself shows no understanding of the word "Fetus" .. which is not constant throughout the journey in terms of awareness ------ meaning .. there is a time when the Fetus is not aware of anything .. and there is a time (which happens to be prior to birth) when the fetus is aware.

The question that both sides are avoiding is "When does the Soul Arrive" -- what we will define as The "I AM" moment ..... or if one is a fan of Monty Python .. "I Drink therefor I AM"

The brain simply does not have the ability to capacitate the "I AM" until the wiring of the brain is mostly complete ~ 22 weeks === at which point .. the brain lights up like an xmas tree .. and we can measure this with EEG .. the lights are on and someone is home .. and when the lights go off .. "brain dead" the coroner pulls the plug and the dirt nap begins ... NOT a Coma . .. the person having plenty of brain activity .. lights are still on.

No "I AM" = no thoughts, no memories, no pain, no nothing -- lights out u understand ? The Soul has not come down from heaven into the fleshy abode Yet .. .. no Soul .. no person -- although I have met a few where it is questionable. ..

 

I do not equate the soul with the mind.

The "aliens" in "alien abductions" are the ghosts of aborted fetuses who have come back to haunt us. The so-called "grays" are described as having fetal-like features: skinny limbs and large heads. One particular feature — the large black eyes — has a counterpart in the womb. At six weeks, the eyes of the fetus are wide open and black, without eyelids or irises.

The 1993 movie Fire in the Sky, about a logger's claim that he was abducted by aliens, is nearly literal in depicting the abductee as a fetus. Inside the "spaceship," the abductee breaks out of a placenta-like casing and then floats in a womb-like cavern while grasping what appears to be an umbilical cord.

The similarity between the abduction aliens and fetuses was also noted by Matt Graeber in the Summer 1996 issue of UFO Sightings. In the article "UFO Abductions: Nocturnal Terror," he observed, "Many female abductees are persons who have suffered the loss of a child through miscarriage or they may have terminated a pregnancy (or pregnancies) by clinical abortion . . . How odd it seems that the 'fetus-like aliens' should be 'so caught up' with gynecological procedures and genetic experimentation upon American earth women at precisely the same point in time we Americans are so obsessed with the abortion issue."

While Graeber suggested that alien abduction imagery is generated by internal psychological conflict, I argue that the experience represents contact with the spiritual world.

More details at:
https://www.robertsurbanek.com/911.html

 

It matters not what you equate the soul. What matters is that before 22 weeks there is no ability of the fleshy above to capacitate "the mind" ... all of which exist in your UFO examples.

 

What are you talking about ? "The Fetus" is not the same mental status from 3 weeks to 22 weeks. As such there is a time when there is no conscious and a time after which there is .. as described in post 7

 

?

 

"I'm sure the fetus can feel pain just like an animal" -- No .. the fetus can not feel pain .. until ~ 22 weeks old.

 

It's true, I memorized entire dialogues from the soap operas my mother would watch during the day towards the end of being pregnant with me. I also knew half my ABCs and wrote a half legible thank you note for the doctor that delivered me.

But yet I'm still pro-choice. Be like me.

 

That's a mischaracterization of one of multiple pro-choice arguments. Available medical evidence does NOT suggest that the fetus has no feelings or thoughts until birth. Rather, sufficient neurological development for feelings, thoughts, and pain perception does not occur until after 20 weeks gestation (not an exact time, I have seen 20.5 weeks set as the absolute earliest, when the requisite connections begin to form). This is after the vast majority of abortions occur.

So when talking about embryos and early fetuses, we can dismiss the idea that it has thoughts or feelings. At least not without dramatic evidence that overturns our current understanding of neurological development. I have seen much confusion on things like reflexes and chemical responses to noxious stimuli, but nothing compelling to change the position I described.

 

Especially since the brain forms “inside out”.

https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/...rs in,motor, sensory and cognitive processing.

 

Very interesting to see the story in the New Yorker, not at all a conservative publication. My guess would be that their readership is 90+% pro-choice.

 

None of the above really matters.
Is someone required to keep another human alive, no matter the level of consciousness, against their will?

 

Does not matter. A woman's bodily autonomy must not be compromised. Pregnancy carries risk and they must be allowed to end pregnancy if they wish. Uvalde police knew the risk but once they were confronted with a shooter in a school...

 

And my link is to an on line embryology textbook

Which one do you think is more accurate? Oops I know! The blogger because they agree with your world view!

 

The New Yorker is not a blog. It has been described as the greatest magazine in the world.

 

By whom?
Meanwhile it is still not high on the “evidence base” listing

 

Yes. That actually adds to its credibility in this matter.

 

Does it? Personally I prefer research articles or EBM(EBP) sites for medical data.and when it comes to Embryology the University of NSW online text is a “go to” for me

 

Ummmmmm. Riiiiigggghhhht!

 

In what matter? Their article was on birds and their experience in the shell. The OP is trying to use that article to show that humans do the same with no actual data. Just a correlation fallacy. So the New Yorker, with the listed article at least, isn't even weighing in on the gestation period of a human and what happens there.