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It may or may not be different, because there are many places you could arbitrarily draw a line along the development continuum, but drawing the line after the "infant" stage was rather ridiculous.

Just to be clear, the fetal stage is defined arbitrarily as being between week 9 and week 40. The ability to feel pain, along with minimal consciousness, starts around week 30.

There is very literally a continuum from "two single cells" to "a bag of cells" to "a mass of undifferentiated tissue" to "functional but not fully organized tissue" to "a minimally viable human". There is no stage at which the thing suddenly becomes a human. It would be a lot simpler if there was, but that's not how it is.

In the context of abortion, I stand by my previous comment: abortions are done as early as possible, and this is usually much earlier than week 30. Less than 1% of abortions happen after week 20 in the US, and these are exceptional cases.



> these are exceptional cases

The question wasn't about whether they're exceptional or not. It was... do we anesthesize these exceptional fetuses before killing them?

The CDC says there are about 5000 exceptional fetuses every year. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/ss/ss6907a1.htm


I would think that would be an excellent idea, and with a very large margin for error on gestational age.




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