But pro-abortion doctors, of course, say that we should completely ignore the footage.

Ultrasound images which show 12-week-old foetuses sucking their thumbs and walking in the womb are dangerously misleading, a group of scientists warned today.

The 3D images of unborn babies apparently behaving in a similar way to newborns raised questions over whether the upper limit for abortions should be reduced form 24 weeks.

However, a group of scientists has now warned the scans could be dangerously misleading as they do not reflect the true nature of an unborn baby’s brain.

Dr Donald Peebles, a consultant in foetal medicine at University College London, said the temptation to associate foetal movements with adult movements was “incredibly dangerous” and said they contributed nothing to the debate over whether the legal time limit for abortion should be lowered.

Dr Huseyin Mehmet, a reader in developmental neurobiology at Imperial College London, said that a foetal brain at 23 and 24 weeks was “extremely immature” and described it as being like an orange that has been sliced in half.

You can see the video by clicking here.  It’s pretty amazing stuff.

What I’ve never understood in the abortion debate is the argument put forth here by these scientists.  Why is it ethical and moral to abort an unborn child simply because it is not yet a fully-developed infant?  What criteria should an unborn child have to meet in order for its life to be protected?  Does it have to suck its thumb?  Have a certain level of brain activity?  Have grown all of its fingers and toes?  Those seem rather arbitrary to me.

Once a child is conceived in the mother’s womb it develops for decades right up into adulthood.  It goes from growing arms, lets, fingers, toes and a brain to emerging from the mother’s womb to crawling, walking and talking.  Why is a child any less of a child before one of those steps than after?

I think what some of us have done with abortion is fool ourselves into thinking that an unborn child, before some arbitrary level of development, is not a human life worth protecting because doing so is easier than dealing with the reality of unwanted pregnancies.

(via reader Steve Cates)