Newborn's power of pain perception highly advanced on day one Newborns Can Remember Pain, May Also Possess Short-Term "Pain Memory".(Hospital for Sick Children research, Toronto, Canada)(Brief Article)

Evidence that newborn babies are not only capable of feeling pain, but may possess a short-term "pain memory," will likely add fuel to the upcoming firestorm over the practice of late-term abortion, particularly partial-birth abortion. The dreadful partial-birth procedure, which has been likened to infanticide, is already a target of a House bill banning its practice, which passed by an overwhelming margin in July.

In the new study, published in the August 21 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), by pediatric pain experts at the Hospital for Sick Children at the University of Toronto, the pain response of newborn babies of diabetic mothers were compared with babies born of non-diabetic mothers.

When a diabetic mother gives birth, her baby's blood sugar is monitored closely over the first 24 hours. Blood is drawn by the standard "heel lance" method, in which the baby's heel is first cleaned with a swipe from an alcohol swab, then is jabbed with a sharp metal instrument just above the heel, to express a few drops of blood. The heel is lanced one hour after birth, then every 2 to 4 hours afterward, throughout the baby's first day.

After 24 hours, all 42 babies (of both diabetic and non-diabetic mothers) undergo a venipuncture, in which a small needle is inserted into a vein on the back of a hand, to collect blood for a number of routine newborn tests. The pain experts observed and measured the pain response of the babies during the venipuncture, noting the degree of crying, facial grimacing, and body movement.

The result: the maternal-diabetic babies, who had undergone several painful heel lances over the preceding 24 hours, displayed a larger pain response than babies of non-diabetic mothers, who were being punctured for the first time.

More astonishing yet, 22 percent of the maternal-diabetic babies began to grimace before the puncture, during the preparatory skin cleaning. None of the other babies displayed this anticipatory response. Dr. Anne Taddio and her colleagues postulated that the skin cleaning had become a sort of conditioned stimulus, and concluded, "These data provide further evidence that infant pain is modulated by experience with pain, as in children and adults."

That newborn babies feel pain is not news to those who have paid attention to pain research over the past one-and-a-half decades. However, until the mid-1980s, newborns were simply assumed not to feel pain, or to perceive it only minimally. In what is now universally regarded as an erroneously barbaric practice, major surgery used to be performed on newborn babies with little or no anaesthesia.