(Photo Oli Scarff)
Researchers are trying to determine the exact moment when a baby becomes conscious, but in doing so, they could end up destroying the abortion industry.
Any time the New York Times publishes a piece about infants, babies, or pregnancy, it immediately evokes a worry that the point of their piece is to dehumanize the most vulnerable among us. In its latest piece, “Are Babies Conscious?” researchers discuss evolving thinking about when scientists believe human consciousness begins. While studying newborns and premature infants, researchers found that although they couldn’t communicate, these babies showed signs of adult-level consciousness.
For almost two centuries, the medical community assumed that babies did not feel pain and were not conscious of the world around them. They followed infamous evolutionist Charles Darwin’s assumptions so much so that as late as the 1980’s doctors were performing surgical procedures on newborns without anesthesia because they believed that these children weren’t capable of feeling pain. Things have now changed.
“Other studies have found signs that babies are capable of surprisingly complex forms of thought long before they can speak. They can recognize that a face is more than the sum of its parts; they can carry out simple forms of math in their heads. Findings like these made scientists rethink Darwin’s conclusion; perhaps consciousness emerges earlier than previously believed,” The New York Times stated.
In a German experiment, researchers placed headphones playing “oddball sounds” on newborns who were placed in a special crib outfitted with sensors that could detect tiny magnetic fluctuations. According to the New York Times, these newborns’ brains showed a definite response to the combination of low and high tones.
“It shows that the newborn brain is already performing very close to what we find in an adult brain,” Claudia Passos-Ferreira, a philosopher at New York University, told the outlet.
A separate London-based study, the Developing Connectome Project, showed similar results, according to the New York Times. These babies were fitted with a special cap that mapped electrical activity spontaneously happening during the scan. Dr. Lorina Naci, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, and her team “discovered that regions of baby brains become active together in networks that are similar to those of waking adults, offering another early marker of consciousness.” This holds even for the premature babies they tested.
Dr. Naci believes evidence suggests babies exhibit more complex signs of consciousness than waking adults.
“The idea is that they have this capacity to perceive more of the environment in much richer and more diverse ways,” she said. “They could have a very different experience than we have as grown adults.”
It’s not as if the researchers studying when consciousness begins set out to prove that abortion is barbaric. However, as methods and science improve, it seems reasonable to assume researchers will find that human consciousness starts earlier than we thought, perhaps even as early as conception, which is something pro-life Christians have long argued, which means that destruction of human life at any stage is the active killing of a fully conscious human.
There are about 1.13 million babies killed by abortion in the U.S. every year, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study. Consider how many of these children would have been saved if their mothers knew they were ending the life of a conscious being.
The abortion lobby spends millions of dollars every year on promoting their cause. They want sympathetic state and federal politicians protecting their right to abort babies. But it’s not just about the killing. There is a big business profiting from the sale of human body parts from these aborted souls.
Technically, it’s illegal to sell fetal organs and other samples. However, companies like Cercle Allocation Services get around this law by making money from the so-called procurement of specimens. They receive thousands of dollars in reimbursement for the costs of handling, shipping, processing, and storing organs from aborted babies. Between August and September 2023, they received $16,065 from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine Division of Hematology-Oncology to procure 21 liver and thymus specimens for research.
The Center for Medical Progress’s documentary “What Happened To Clementine?” claims that Cercle procured specimens from a 5-month-gestation infant named Clementine, which they believe took place during a partial-birth abortion. This happens when the baby is born alive before its organs are harvested.
A society’s health should be measured by how well it protects its most vulnerable. As technology continues to catch up to what most inherently know is true (that life/consciousness begins at conception), the ultimate judgment will be whether or not society reacts in disgust to the abortion industry or continues to allow the infanticide that happens during our watch.