Babies Remember Pain

Babies have been crying at birth for centuries but we have been reluctant to
accept their cries as valid expressions of pain which will register in memory. Despite mounting evidence, the
characteristic reaction of psychologists and medical practitioners to infant pain has been one of denial. Key
myths about the brain have provided the rationale for painful procedures. Against this background, studies of
the infant cry prove that crying is meaningful communication. Examples of prenatal and perinatal cries are
examined. Evidence for the pain of circumcision is found in personal memories and research findings. A final
section focuses on pain in the NICU, the delivery room, and the nursery and concludes with an appeal that all
painful procedures imposed on newborns be reconsidered. My granddaughter Bevin, at age 2, while talking
about her birth experience, asked her parents, “Why did they poke me with a thing?” Her mother asked, “What
thing?” “Like a pencil,” she said. “They hurted me.” She was probably referring to the heel stick, the routine way
to take a blood sample from newborns in hospital birth. Bevin remembered the pain of it. Brenda, hypnotized at
age 29, had this memory of pain in the delivery room: Now she’s scooping me up from the doctor and laying me
on this cold, cold, horribly hard, metal scales. It’s so straight and so hard against my back. And I’m screaming
because it is so painful! It hurts so much to be on this hard thing . . . I am screaming and screaming and no one
is coming. Someone put something in my eyes! It’s so cold; it stings, it burns . . . I’m still screaming . . . That
was as hard as I could cry! It hurt . . . Such personal reports of pain at birth are new