"Even birth may not inaugurate the ability to feel pain, according to Stuart Derbyshire, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham in Britain. Derbyshire is a prolific commentator on the subject and an energetic provocateur. In milder moods, he has described the notion of fetal pain as a “fallacy”; when goaded by his critics’ “lazy” thinking, he has pronounced it a “moral blunder” and “a shoddy, sentimental argument.” For all his vehemence in print, Derbyshire is affable in conversation, explaining that his laboratory research on the neurological basis of pain in adults led him to the matter of what fetuses feel: “For me, it’s an interesting test case of what we know about pain. It’s a great application of theory, basically.” The theory, in this case, is that the experience of pain has to be learned — and the fetus, lacking language or interactions with caregivers, has no chance of learning it. In place of distinct emotions, it experiences a blur of sensations, a condition Derbyshire has likened to looking at “a vast TV screen with all of the world’s information upon it from a distance of one inch; a great buzzing mass of meaningless information,” he writes."