Pre-Born Consciousness and the Value of Life

Posted byJessica HolmesPosted inScience/TechnologyTags:, ,

Pre-Born Consciousness and the Value of Life

Abortion activists across the nation have justified the slaughter of millions of pre-born children, dehumanizing them with terms like ‘blastocyst’ and ‘fetus’ to remove any value associated with them. Any suggestion that the child might have life, might have a soul, is immediately dismissed with shrill screams of “my body, my choice”. They have fought tooth and nail for almost 50 years to preserve their “right” to slaughter the innocent and it is only within the last few years that such decisions have been passed back to the states to regulate and eliminate as they choose. Many legislators have looked to the development of strong ultrasound techniques to reveal the tiny human within, show their growing fingers, toes, heart, and brain all along the way, further giving credence to the life within, combating the screams of those who would sacrifice them for gain. Now, science has dared to challenge the very foundation of the abortion argument – are babies in the womb conscious?

While every human alive once lived through their own infant stages, few if any, remember such early years of development from their own perspective. This isn’t a small wonder – our brains undergo such intense growth from the time we are born to our first birthday that we are hardly the same person month to month, much less at the turn of the first year. But does such faulty recollection suggest that infants, pre-born or otherwise, do not experience consciousness at all?

This is the question that an international research team, composed of representative scientists from the US, Germany, and Australia, sought to answer1. Based at Trinity College Dublin, these investigators conducted a methodological review of all of the work done on fetal consciousness. Admittedly, this is a very challenging field of study, since the researchers cannot gather any verbal or estimate intentional behavior from the perspective outside the womb. Thus, establishing what consciousness is or how consciousness could be measured was key. Of course, it is true that immediately at conception, the child does not yet have the neural network available to support consciousness. But when in a child’s development does the capacity for consciousness take place? From the Platonic view, who sees the soul as a sort of pilot directing the body, when does the soul take up residence within the body?

Unsurprisingly, this is a hot debate within the scientific community. The spectrum is long and wide, ranging from those who suggest consciousness arises as early as 24 weeks when the thalamocortical connectivity is established in the brain5 while late-stage consciousness supporters believe that consciousness may arise during the birthing process itself4 or long after the child’s first birthday6. Because of this wide variety of perspectives in the scientific community, the team of researchers agreed that the best way to approach the ontogenesis of consciousness would be to analyze infant and fetal brain activity, as analysis of brain activity had been previously used to evaluate the consciousness levels of patients who have suffered from severe brain-injury2-3,7-8. 

As brain activity is the primary mode of analysis, the researchers investigated the intrinsic neural connectivity networks, like the default mode network (DMN)9. This aptly named region of the brain is in charge of task-free resting states, including wandering thoughts or self-referential processing. While it was previously thought that infants had minimal DMN activity, a recent study discovered that, not only do infants have function in the DMN, but also had fully functioning networks in dorsal attention and executive control networks shortly after full-term birth3. Even more incredibly, these findings revealed that a reciprocal relationship between these networks were also present. In short, the infant brain is far more connected and developed than had previously been accounted for. If the network is there at birth, is it possible that consciousness could be detected before birth? 

The answer, incredibly, is yes. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques have now made it possible to obtain information about brain function during fetal development (Figure 1)10. Researchers collected data from 39 fetuses between 24 and 38 weeks of post-conceptual age and found long-range, cerebral-cerebellar, cortical-subcortical, and intra-hemispheric neural functional connectivity long before the birth of the infant. Where once science had discounted the pre-born child as nothing more than a clump of cells, it has now revealed the baby to be unique and conscious, full of life and ready for its next stages.

Figure 1. fMRI of fetal brain activity10.

This, of course, is not the only line of research pursued by our researchers. Figure 2 below shows that much more lines of analyses are available for investigation and revelation about the human person. But here, science has given us a first taste of the truth behind the veil – that we are all uniquely and wonderfully made, created in the image of God, fully human even before we pass through the birth canal. In a world in which man debates on whether or not to end this precious life before it fully enters the world, such lines of investigation are more important than ever. Perhaps if more could see babies as the human persons they truly are, we will be more inclined to preserve their lives.

Figure 2. The case for early emergence as presented by Bayne et. al.1

References

  1. Bayne, T., Frohlich, J., Cusack, R., Moser, J., & Naci, L. (2023). Consciousness in the cradle: On the emergence of infant experience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(12), 1135–1149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.08.018
  2. Blumberg, M. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2023). Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(3), 233–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.12.014
  3. Hu, H., Cusack, R., & Naci, L. (2022). Typical and disrupted brain circuitry for conscious awareness in full-term and preterm infants. Brain Communications, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcac071
  4. Mellor, D. J., Diesch, T. J., Gunn, A. J., & Bennet, L. (2005). The importance of ‘awareness’ for understanding fetal pain. Brain Research Reviews, 49(3), 455–471. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresrev.2005.01.006
  5. Padilla, N., & Lagercrantz, H. (2020). Making of the mind. Acta Paediatrica, 109(5), 883–892. https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.15167
  6. Perner, J., & Dienes, Z. (2003). Developmental aspects of consciousness: How much theory of mind do you need to be consciously aware? Consciousness and Cognition, 12(1), 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1053-8100(02)00010-7
  7. Peterson, A. (2016). Consilience, clinical validation, and Global Disorders of Consciousness. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2016(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niw011
  8. Shea, N., & Bayne, T. (2010). The vegetative state and the science of Consciousness. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 61(3), 459–484. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axp046
  9. Spreng, R. N., & Grady, C. L. (2010). Patterns of brain activity supporting autobiographical memory, prospection, and theory of mind, and their relationship to the default mode network. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(6), 1112–1123. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21282
  10. Thomason, M. E., Grove, L. E., Lozon, T. A., Vila, A. M., Ye, Y., Nye, M. J., Manning, J. H., Pappas, A., Hernandez-Andrade, E., Yeo, L., Mody, S., Berman, S., Hassan, S. S., & Romero, R. (2015). Age-related increases in long-range connectivity in fetal functional neural connectivity networks in utero. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 11, 96–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2014.09.001 

Jessica Holmes