Though abortion advocates often deny the value, rights, and humanity of preborn human beings, it appears there are some embryos for which they do feel concern: chicken embryos.
Vox published an article last week about the problem of male chicks in the egg business. As Vox reported, “While the female chicks go on to lay the more than 1.2 trillion eggs humans consume annually, 6.5 billion male chicks each year are hatched, only to be quickly snuffed out. That’s because they don’t lay eggs, so they’re of no use to the egg industry, and because they don’t grow as big and fast as other chicken breeds, they’re of no use to the chicken meat industry.”
Companies kill the male chicks right after birth by tossing them into a grinder, and this fact disturbed enough people that some European nations began to ban the practice — which is understandable. As a result, companies have begun using technology to determine what the sex of a chick is while still in the egg. If the chick is found to be a male, the egg is destroyed.
But the pre-hatched chicks could begin to feel pain a third of the way through their incubation period (by the end of their “first trimester,” so to speak). Vox pointed out:
Scientists believe that chick embryos could potentially feel pain as early as day seven of their 21-day incubation period. That means that even with the most advanced in-ovo sexing, male chick embryos could still be experiencing suffering.
A new preprint study, funded by the German government and conducted by researchers at the Technical University of Munich, provides some evidence that chicken embryos may not be capable of feeling pain until much later in the incubation period, after day 12.
Researchers applied potentially painful stimuli like heat and electricity to chicken embryos from day 7 to day 19 of their 21-day incubation, measuring their heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity, and movement, all in an effort to uncover whether the stimuli translated to experienced pain. Brain activity only began on day 13, movement from beak stimulation increased significantly on day 15, blood pressure increased significantly on day 16, heart rate jumped on day 17, and body movement increased significantly on day 18.
So brave and unexpected of pro-choice @voxdotcom to devote serious consideration to young embryos possibly feeling pain in —
Oh, my bad. These are CHICKEN abortions. Human embryos can continue to pound sand.https://t.co/znVKQube2v
— Secular Pro-Life (@secularprolife) May 3, 2023
Interestingly, much of this applies to preborn human children as well. At the moment of fertilization, the baby has her own unique DNA, with her sex, hair color, eye color, and countless other traits already determined. Additionally, the heart begins beating at just three weeks gestation, and brain waves can be measured by six weeks. By nine weeks, the baby can suck her thumb.
As for the ability to feel pain, new research indicates that preborn children may feel pain as early as eight weeks. Other research similarly indicates that they feel pain no later than the end of the first trimester.
Yet preborn children are still subjected to brutally violent and painful abortion procedures, and websites including Vox find this perfectly acceptable. In the D&E abortion procedure, a preborn human capable of feeling pain is killed by dismemberment as the abortionist tears off her arms and legs and then crushes her skull. Abortionists know they have successfully crushed the skull when there is an “extrusion of white cerebral material” — the baby’s brain matter.
In the first trimester, preborn humans are killed by the abortion pill, which deprives them of nutrients, essentially starving them, or they are killed through a first-trimester surgical abortion, which uses a suction machine that pulls apart their fragile bodies — and research states they may be able to feel pain at eight weeks.
For Vox, it’s an abhorrent injustice when chicken embryos are destroyed if they can feel pain, but it’s empowering when a woman has an abortion, even if her human embryo or fetus can feel pain because, to abortion advocates, the preborn human is a meaningless piece of goo.
