Pain in the Ass

An bill making its way through the Ohio legislature has attracted a lot of attention lately for proposing that abortions be outlawed after a fetal heartbeat can be detected - which occurs about 6 or 7 weeks after conception.  This law - HB 125 - is not only in direct defiance of Roe v. Wade (which mandates that abortion rights not be violated prior to viability, currently defined at 24 weeks of gestation), but was also recently the subject of a court case in which a pregnant woman was given a ultrasound in the courtroom when her 9-week-old fetus was called to "testify."

Similarly, many states require that a pregnant woman have an ultrasound and listen to her fetus' heartbeat prior to obtaining an abortion.  These ridiculous bills are founded on the sappily sweet "Touched by an Angel" sentiment that a beating heart on an ultrasound could never cause anything but joy and reverence.  Naturally, however, lots of organisms have circulatory organs just as complex as the heart tube found in the 7-week fetus:  the cattle and pigs we don't hesitate to slaughter for meat, for example.  Maybe McDonald's patrons should be legally required to listen to a bovine heartbeat before deciding whether to order a McRib.

As does a major myocardial infarction, fatass

What worries those of a slightly more scientific, less sentimental nature is the issue of embryonic brain development and fetal pain.  After all, no brain, no pain.  The fetal pain argument has recently led five US states (Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Idaho) to ban abortions after 20 weeks of gestation - once again, in direct opposition to Roe v. Wade.  Now, since I just finished writing a paper on fetal cortical development for my Developmental Biology course, I'll try to reproduce the gist of the argument here to dispel any and all concerns for fetal pain in abortion.

The cerebral cortex, the portion of the brain necessary for thought, language, and pain sensation, begins forming around 8 weeks post conception, when the anterior and posterior regions of the dorsal telencephalon start secreting signals to pattern the cortical layout.  From this point, cortical progenitor cells in the subventricular zone begin differentiating into glial cells and neurons, and neurons begin the process of migrating upward to the cortical plate.  Once they have reached their destination, they will undergo myelination and form synapses with other neurons, in a process which will continue throughout development and even after birth.

http://www.humpath.com/spip.php?article5287&id_document=4056

The brain of a 22-week-old human fetus

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 88% of abortions occur prior to 12 weeks of gestation.  At 12 weeks after conception, the regions of the cortex have been specified, but neuronal migration is just beginning, and will not be completed for at least another month.  The neuronal circuits that are needed for sensory perception will not form until much later, 24 weeks at the earliest.

Neurons beginning their migration

Neurobiologists are and have been in agreement that a fetus cannot feel pain prior to 24 weeks of gestation, since the circuits needed for sensation are simply not present before that time (seriously, no brain, no pain).  Less than 2% of abortions occur after 20 weeks of gestation, and abortions are performed after the 24-week mark only in the most dire of situations.  So, an aborted fetus can not and will not feel pain.  Questions answered?  Problems solved?  If only.

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day!  As I write this post, I am feeling pretty satisfied about the state of my life:  I sent my mom a homemade card, med school applications are underway, I am not myself a mother, and I might just have put my finger on exactly why the pro-life movement bothers me so much.

It came to me while I was thinking about my own sweet mother.  For years, this woman helped me with infernal science fair projects, drove me to violin lessons and birthday parties, and endured my tantrums with a patience that astounds me more and more the older I am.  She made sure that I ate my vegetables, paid for my braces, and allowed me to host slumber parties that would inevitably result in my giggling and screaming pre-pubescent friends running all over the house in the middle of the night.  Even now, almost a quarter century after giving birth to me, she pays for my education, sends me cute cards and letters "just because," and loses sleep over my well-being.   She does all this in spite of the fact that I am a legal adult.  And it's the same with my dad.  Parenthood really is a life sentence, or at least a binding contract.  

Pro-life protesters trying to deter women from entering clinics often call out helpful incentives to keep their babies, such as offers for a free baby blanket or pacifier.  This is a huge insult, as it implies that the pocket change needed to purchase baby supplies is the biggest obstacle an accidental mother will face.  Leaving aside the enormous financial investment that a baby requires, raising a child demands maturity, patience, stability, and life-long devotion.

http://cdn.keyj.com/files/2011/05/adult-baby-250x200.png

Not to be entered into lightly

The crisis pregnancy centers that manipulate women into becoming mothers and the pro-life activists who just succeeded in defunding Indiana's Planned Parenthood are, in essence, grossly undervaluing the enormous commitment that parenthood entails.  Parenthood doesn't end after a 9-month gestation, nor after 18 to 26 years of tax dependency.  While I'm celebrating my mother today for choosing to have me, I fully acknowledge that she didn't have to do so.  Women deserve every chance to decide whether to enter into the biggest (and longest-lasting) commitment of their lives.  And children deserve parents ready and willing to make that commitment.  

"Population," or "The World Is Not Enough"

When the Supreme Court delivered its famous Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, it upheld a woman's right to choose based on the Constitution's guarantee of a right to privacy.  This makes perfect sense:  the prevention or termination of pregnancy is, and should be, a private matter, and thus the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman alone.  I contend, however, that the opposite does not hold true:  the decision to give birth is not a matter of privacy.  A woman who has an abortion affects only herself; bringing another human being into the world, on the other hand, immediately impacts the mother, the newborn individual, the larger community, and the very fate of the planet.

The concept of a population's carrying capacity is something we all learned about in high school.  The idea is that a population of organisms will increase in size until it reaches a set number, determined by resource availability and competition pressure.  After this point, large scale death will prevent further population growth.  population size will oscillate around the point of the carrying capacity, but increased death rates and reduced reproductive fitness will not allow population size to increase further.

http://www.goldiesroom.org/Note%20Packets/22%20Ecology/00%20Ecology--WHOLE.htm

We usually discuss such concepts of population in relation to yeast cells, mice, deer, etc.:  organisms to which we have no particular emotional attachment.  We have to be a lot more careful, though, when talking about the growth of the human population, since most of what we do is already an effort to deny that we are, by definition, animals, constrained by biological precepts.  The notion that we are somehow different from yeast cells, mice, or deer is enforced by the observation that our population's growth curve currently shows no indication of approaching a carrying capacity limit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/aqa/evolution/humansrev1.shtml

The fact that our population's growth curve has so far been uninhibited by starvation or disease seems to be testament to our high level of "success," reproductively speaking.  Nevertheless, though our world population will reach 7 billion this year, hunger, disease, and conflict are still taking their toll, killing millions each year even as new births more than compensate for this loss.  A little less than half of the world's 7 billion people currently live on under 2 USD a day.  And these are the communities whose populations are growing the fastest.

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins advanced the idea that exercising moderation in reproduction could actually be evolutionarily advantageous.  Producing many more offspring than can survive under certain environmental conditions is, evolutionarily speaking, wasteful.  Likewise, reproducing at an unchecked rate will quickly deplete resources and is also a terrible evolutionary strategy.  For these reasons, the population of a certain organism will stay relatively constant over time, and when population pressure begins to increase, the organism will (unconsciously, of course) curb its rate of reproduction to avoid a dangerous scarcity of resources somewhere down the line.  

Human reproduction, however, has proceeded at an explosive rate, which Dawkins attributes to modern medicine, the welfare state, and complete failure to look to the future.  We may have been reproductively successful during the last five hundred years, but that is small change in the span of evolutionary time.  Our current reproductive strategy is, to say the least, unsustainable, and may prevent us from seeing another five hundred years.  As Dawkins says, "The one thing animal populations do not do is go on increasing indefinitely."

http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/ballantine-books/14

Unfortunately, population discussions are not politically correct, and tend to conjure up dystopian images of calculated killings and mass sterilization programs.  Furthermore, the discomfort with the issue belongs to those at every stage along the entire political spectrum.  Regardless of the environmental or societal impact, argue conservatives and liberals alike, the human right of reproduction is too sacrosanct to curtail.  Thus we talk about population growth in positive, rather than normative terms:  "How will we emend farming techniques and colonize other planets to keep up with the human race's inevitable increase?" Yet the human population has the potential to double in less than a hundred years; we can't afford to be so magnanimous forever.  In a stand-off between biology and political correctness, biology will always prevail in the end.