> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
It's unknown where the consciousness starts (the hard problem sense) is but it's not unreasonable to assume that sentience (ability to feel pain and pleasure and experience subjectively) and ability to suffer that comes with it happens long before the ability to form long term memories, object permanence, or other any other cognitive abilities.
As terrifying as it is, I wonder if a large part of it was because anesthesia on infants is a lot more dangerous because of the low body weight and unknown metabolism. That could lead to a lot of complications, so if there was reason to believe that it wouldn't otherwise impact the infant (no long term memory) it could be more ethical and safer to not do so. That said I'd assume they've solved those problems now if they're using it.
> > surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
From a quick search: "Only 45% of doctors who do circumcisions use any anesthesia at all. Obstetricians perform 70% of circumcisions and are least likely to use anesthesia - only 25% do."
General anesthesia on infants has been indicated to cause "reduced gray matter density in certain brain regions" that results in a 5-6 point lower IQ on average in adults who had undergone surgery involving general anesthesia before the age of 4.
Experiences of stress will even impact the neurological development of an embryo or a fetus. It's totally realistic to assume that a human will have to suffer psychologically even decades later from a psychological scarring caused by such surgery without anesthesia.
There is evidence supporting that hypothesis. The idea that pain trauma mainly works trough personal memories processes was the reason why PSTD in adults was long seen as character weakness.
The idea that infants nervous system is more fragile should be the starting point.
Many people have experienced severe pain as a result of childhood injuries. We’re supposed to believe that they’re all walking around with PTSD as a result?
I (and Occam's razor) would say the exact opposite - one should assume the effect will be the similar as for an older human, unless proven otherwise.
Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that? And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?
> Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that?
Babies are very bad at remembering things. It might be that remembering isn't a big factor, but it's a pretty obvious basis for the idea.
> And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?
So you're not only going to associate everyone that disagrees with you with racism, you're going to say it's "evidence-free" that babies are different from the default human?
> It's totally realistic to assume that a human will have to suffer psychologically even decades later from a psychological scarring caused by such surgery without anesthesia.
That’s what OP said, emphasis mine. I agree with you: that infants experience pain in the same way as adults should be the default hypothesis. That they remain psychologically scarred by it for decades,
however, should not be.
Why not? The obvious difference is that an adults nervous system is developed while an infant's is still developing.
"Early life stress may have a lasting impact on the developmental programming of the dopamine (DA) system implicated in psychosis." [1]
I highly recommend Gabor Maté's book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" for a deeper discussion of how various types of pre- and postnatal stress impact a person's proclivity towards addictive behavior and ADHD.
But even for adults extreme and overwhelming stressful experiences can cause long-lasting and even multigenerational psychological consequences through epigenetic mechanisms.
The link you provide A) has a very low N (24, half of which are controls) and B) does not account for genetic confounding. Am I missing something?
Also, there is essentially zero evidence for hereditary epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic changes are common in the somatic cell lineages (which make up the entire organism except for the sperm and eggs), but there are very few plausible mechanisms by which epigenetic changes in somatic cells can somehow make their way back to the germ line cells (eggs and sperm) and, thus, exert an influence on subsequent generations. On top of the theoretical underpinnings being essentially implausible, there is no good evidence that hereditary epigenetic mechanisms exist. The only evidence I am aware of in humans are the children of Dutch women who went through a famine in 1944. However, that evidence has since evaporated. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia[0]:
"Moreover, the children of the women who were pregnant during the famine were smaller, as expected. However, surprisingly, when these children grew up and had children those children were thought to also be smaller than average.[11] This data suggested that the famine experienced by the mothers caused some kind of epigenetic changes that were passed down to the next generation. Despite this, a subsequent study by the same author failed to find a correlation between maternal exposure to famine and birth weight of the next generation."
I think the parent is attempting to ridicule the GP or trilialise the way they see circumcision - some Americans get practically religious with their defence of mutilating their newborn boys' penises.
I think the parent is making a rational comparison between many classes of being that we tend to define as either the animated unconscious or insensitive to pain in order to assuage guilt for killing them out of convenience.
I'm extremely pro-abortion and think it should be allowed for any reason by the mother until the fetus would be viable if birth were immediately induced. I will also continue to kill flying bugs who are unfortunate enough to get past my window screen but can't figure out how to leave. I will not refuse to see the comparison and I will address the potential cognitive dissonance.
> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
It's unknown where the consciousness starts (the hard problem sense) is but it's not unreasonable to assume that sentience (ability to feel pain and pleasure and experience subjectively) and ability to suffer that comes with it happens long before the ability to form long term memories, object permanence, or other any other cognitive abilities.