Re: Democrats overwhelmingly vote against Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection A
There you go again. make an asinine false statement then argue it as fact.
Overview: Fetal Development | First Trimester | Pregnancy.org
My bad, 40 days....
Day 40: Brain waves can be detected and recorded.
week 8 baby starts responding to stimuli:
Week 8: Now a little more than an inch long, the fetus has everything found in a fully developed adult. The stomach produces digestive juices, the kidneys are functioning and genitals have begun to form. Forty muscle sets operate in conjunction with the nervous system and
the fetus responds to touch.
I'll hold at 8 as a compromise, but 40 days really.
All of this is nonsense. Someone already posted a link about the brain wave thing -- basically, that's complete and utter BS.
A 40-day fetus has cells with a charge, like all cells do. It will respond to having electricity put through it from an external source. So will the cells in your leg, or the cells of a plant. It has nothing to do with the brain, it's just a property of all living cells. They have no brain activity whatsoever. That doesn't start until the very end of the second trimester. Even a super-premie born around 24 weeks only has irregular, uncoordinated activity -- no regular patterns. But prior to 20 weeks, nothing whatsoever. There are no functional neurons in the brain at all before that point, therefore it is physically impossible for them to have "brain waves." Unless you believe brains run on magic, I guess.
The organs thing is also bunk. An 8-week embryo has no organs that function in the way required for sustained human life. Some don't work at all or aren't even present, like the lungs. Others do perform functions, but not in the way a developed human body would require for life. The intestines do contract and make fluid, for example, but couldn't handle human milk, let alone food. They serve a completely different purpose more similar to an early ancestor of a fish than a human. The role they play at 8 weeks is to output into the amniotic sack.
The genitals are still generic, and have not differentiated at all. Differentiation doesn't even start until the end of the first trimester, around 11 or 12 weeks. At 8 weeks, the required hormones often aren't even active.
If any of the things you were saying were true, we'd be able to save an 8-week miscarriage. They would have all the systems required for us to put them on life support. Just make smaller tubes. Problem solved.
And yet, we have never saved any fetus born younger than about 22 weeks, because any younger and they wouldn't have the organs required to receive life support.
This is the reason we can't save embryos or early fetuses. In order to put someone on life support, they have to have formed human organs to receive the support. An embryo doesn't. Not at 8 weeks, or 12, or 16, or even 20.
The pure ignorant fantasy of this is just insane.
