Birth and death

Does a foetus have ‘awareness’?

Can prenatal babies understand? Can foetuses learn? Do they know good from bad, life from death? If science and its commercial manifestation of product sales are concerned, the answer is yes. There is a $199.95 prenatal education system in Australia that, according to its sellers, “helps kick-start learning for children still in the womb — by providing stimulating, rhythmic sounds that mimic their mother’s heartbeat. As the rhythms change, babies learn to differentiate the sounds, strengthening brain development”. Biological research is clearly indicating the presence of consciousness in the foetus, apart from life.

Ending such a life is a crime recognised by the Indian law. But the adverse sex ratio in favour of boys shows that like all good laws in the country, implementation is virtually non-existent. The jailing of a doctor and his assistant who helped parents kill these lives through an ingenious code of sex determination will be lauded. The question to which there is no scientific answer, however, is: when does the soul enter a foetus?

I spoke to some students of spirituality and the answer was any time between conception and three months; in rare cases, a little later. According to them, killing a foetus who can’t defend herself — not even with her helpless eyes that yearn for and look forward to life — therefore, becomes a crime as violent, as condemnable, as sad as that of an adult’s. What makes it worse, they argue, is that the soul that comes to grow in a particular body, through specific parents, in a precise location, has to choose all over again.

The Vedic culture recognised the right to life of a foetus to be the same as that of an adult’s. This recognition rested on the fact that a foetus has “awareness”. Then, bhruna hatya (the killing of a foetus), was among pancha maha pathakas (five cardinal sins), including the killing of women, cows, brahmins and babies. More than 5,000 years ago, Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna and Subhadra learnt the art of entering one of the most complex military formations, the Chakravyuh, from his uncle, Krishna. He learnt it as a foetus, and executed it 16 years later through a death more heroic than many lives.

Any lessons for us here?