Babies may suffer more from pain than older people do
At Cosmos, science writer Velentina Boulter tells us that a study out of University College London offers some insight into infants and pain:
The study focused on the three main subnetworks of how people feel and understand pain.
The first subnetwork is about noticing the pain and physically sensing it, this is known as the sensory-discriminative aspect. The affective-motivational subnetwork is about how the pain makes some feel emotionally and the cognitive-evaluative subnetwork is how people interpret the pain.
“In newborn babies, this network is underdeveloped, which could mean that pain experience in newborns is totally different from the way we, as adults, understand it,” says Fabrizi.
To outline how these three pain subnetworks mature in babies, the researchers used brain MRI data from two of the largest datasets available, the Developing Human Connectome Project and the Human Connectome Project.
“Babies experience pain before they can comprehend it,” June 25, 2025
Image Credit: Africa Studio - Significantly, researcher Fabrizi Lorenzoa noted “Our results suggest that preterm babies may be particularly vulnerable to painful medical procedures during critical stages of brain development.”
From the paper:
This study reveals a previously unknown pattern of early development of the infrastructure necessary to encode different components of pain experience. Newborn neural pathways required for mature pain processing in the brain are incomplete in newborns compared with adults, particularly regarding the emotional and evaluative aspects of pain. The rapid age-related changes suggest that pain processing, and consequently pain experience, changes rapidly over this developmental period and unlikely to be the same as in adults, even at term.
Jones, Laura; Batalle, Dafnis; Meek, Judith; Edwards, A. Davidc Fitzgerald, Maria; Arichi, Tomokic; Fabrizi, Lorenzoa,*. Differential maturation of the brain networks required for the sensory, emotional, and cognitive aspects of pain in human newborns. PAIN ():10.1097/j.pain.0000000000003619, June 18, 2025. | DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000003619
Knowledge of what is happening (which babies lack) often works to suppress and contain pain. Michael Egnor has noted,
Certainly anyone who is had any experience with very young or premature infants can attest that children at this age seem to experience pain quite intensely. I have cared for hundreds of premature infants and it is very clear that these very young children experience pain intensely. An innocuous needlestick in the heel to draw small amount of blood would ordinarily not be particularly painful for an adult. But a tiny infant will scream at such discomfort.
“Abortion Advocate Admits in a Medical Journal That Unborn Children Feel Pain,” Mind Matters News, January 21, 2020
Of course this should have implications for the grisly deaths of such infants in abortions. But in that case, politics suppresses scientific curiosity.
You may also wish to read: The junk science of the abortion lobby. Fetuses not only experience pain but experience it more intensely than do adults. (Michael Egnor)
