Update:
A reader asks how squirrels can pop their heads OUT of a window and don’t I mean INTO?
Well, they mostly pop INTO windows, but I was thinking of a recent experience chasing critters from my attic: When I stuck a 20-ft pole into a ventilation hole in the gable of the attic, guess whose furry head popped out indignantly from the hole next to it?
ORIGINAL PIECE
From LRC blog:
“Only when the ability to anticipate touch and move with intention – for example opening the mouth to suck – has developed is a baby ready to leave the safety of the womb, they added.
Psychologist Dr Nadja Reissland explained: ‘Increased touching of the lower part of the face and mouth in foetuses could be an indicator of brain development necessary for healthy development, including preparedness for social interaction, self-soothing and feeding.’
The discovery comes after a previous study found babies make faces in the womb, potentially as practice before coming in to the world.
Dr Reissland and a team of researchers led by Durham University used ’4D’ ultrasound scans – 3D scans that can be seen in real time – to image eight girls and seven boys once a month between the 24th and 36th week of pregnancy.”
Comment:
Babies making faces in the womb – that surely registers on the cuteness meter up there with kittens grooming their whiskers and squirrels popping their heads out of a window.?
This type of finding inevitably argues for the “personhood” of the baby, if not his/her citizenship.
It also argues that the pro-choice movement’s relegation of the question of even late-term abortions to the mother is due for a serious re-think.
It would be consistent for those feminists to go the whole hog and consider infants up to one year in the same category as the foetus. That would be logically sound, since it would take infanticide out of the realm of the state and leave it up to the mother. However, while this is a position that is intellectually coherent, it is publicly indefensible.
Thus, even from the point of view of the optics of the matter, it makes more sense to extend our thinking about infanticide backward into the womb. That is to say, late-term abortions should be banned.
The idea is not keep women bare-foot and pregnant, as many hard-line feminists suggest. The babies, after all, would be be offered for adoption and the mother would be free to move on, if she chose to.
The idea is to reduce human suffering.