Unborn babies may feel pain at 13 weeks claims new study

UNBORN babies may feel pain while being aborted, according to scientists who say they are vulnerable before reaching 24 weeks.

Until now the consensus of medical opinion had been that foetuses cannot feel discomfort before 24 weeks’ gestation, after which abortion is illegal in Britain – except in special cases.

However, medical researchers, including a “pro-choice” British pain expert, suggest unborn babies might be able to feel “something like pain” as early as 13 weeks.

They advised that medical staff should ask if the woman wants the foetus to be given pain relief before the abortion.

To carry on regardless of evidence section, pictured, which is becoming unstable. Co-owner Nik Brenner said: “It’s the last thing we want to do, but the finances are just not there.”

The 1865 pier featured in the 2018 film The Mercy, starring Colin Firth, about yachtsman Donald Crowhurst.

“flirts with moral recklessness”, they wrote in the influential Journal of Medical Ethics.

The lead author of the controversial article, Professor Stuart Derbyshire, who has consulted for the Pro-Choice Forum in the UK, had previously thought that the cortex, the outer brain layer that deals with sensory information, is not developed enough to register.

In 2006, he wrote in the British Medical Journal that avoiding talking to women seeking abortions about foetal pain was “sound policy based on good evidence that foetuses cannot experience pain”.

But in the recent JME article, he for pain and American medic Dr John Bockmann said there is now “good evidence”’ that the brain and nervous system are sufficiently developed by 18 weeks for the foetus to feel pain.

Women going for abortions who have reached this stage of pregnancy should be told the foetus could experience pain while being terminated, Derbyshire and Bockmann advised. They said: “It seems reasonable that the clinical team and the pregnant woman are encouraged to consider foetal analgesia [pain relief].”

In 2018 there were 200,608 terminations in England and Wales, according to analysis by the Office for National Statistics.

ONE of Britain’s oldest seaside piers is due to be shortened by 100ft because of weather damage and a lack of funds. The 696ft Grand Pier in Teignmouth, Devon, suffered its worst damage in the storms of February 2014. It is almost certain to lose its wider end