Editing Openai/692c5e6a-daac-800f-8ce0-b9c62a9fa661 (section)

=== Assistant: That idea floats around a lot, but the truth is messier, stranger, and honestly a little horrifying. ===
That idea floats around a lot, but the truth is messier, stranger, and honestly a little horrifying.

Doctors did think babies felt pain before the 1980s… but they believed babies didn’t feel it the same way adults do. The old medical assumption (from the 1940s–1970s) was basically:

“Newborn nervous systems aren’t fully developed, so they probably don’t feel pain as intensely, and even if they do, they won’t remember it.”

That belief led to some deeply wrong decisions.

Then in 1985, a famous case blew the medical world wide open. A baby named Jeffrey Lawson had open-heart surgery with only a paralytic drug—no anesthesia—because doctors thought the baby wouldn’t really feel it.

His mother, Jill Lawson, fought back fiercely and exposed the practice. After that, research ramped up fast.

By the late 1980s, the medical community finally accepted what parents already knew:
Babies feel pain. They feel it intensely. And it can affect the brain long-term.

So the real timeline looks like this:

Before the 1980s:
Doctors underestimated infant pain and often didn’t use anesthesia or used very light sedation.

1985–1987:
Research proved newborns have functioning pain pathways and stress responses. Medical standards began changing.

1990s onward:
Full anesthesia for infant surgery became standard care.

Not because babies “didn’t feel pain,” but because of a long-standing medical myth that went unchallenged too long.

It’s one of those moments where science had to catch up to basic human common sense.