When does an unborn baby begin growing hair?
Babies start growing hair before they are even born, Kids Health says. By the 14th week of pregnancy, babies in the womb develop a layer of lanugo, which is a soft, fine hair that starts on his face and eventually covers his entire body. Hair starts to grow on a baby’s head as early as the 30th week of pregnancy and, by the 32nd week, the baby develops eyelashes and eyebrows. Lanugo starts to fall off prior to delivery, with most of it shed by birth.
Because hair begins at such an early time in pregnancy, babies who are aborted in the second or third trimester are sometimes described as having some or a full head of hair. At LiveAction, pro-life writer Sarah Terzo describes a nurse who talked about the hair of an aborted baby.
Clinic worker “Diana” was comfortable with handling late-term aborted babies until she saw one with hair:
Sterile room is so fast-paced. And I’m a person who’s really into learning….And so, okay, now I’ve got the technical down, so now I can, like, get lax in my thought processes. You know, it becomes more robotic.
And I think that what happened one day [was] I stepped back inside of myself, and I was just like, “Oh my God, what are you doing? When I saw the hair…
The pro-abortion author who quoted “Diana” didn’t say whether the shock of seeing the body of a child developed enough to have hair changed her mind about abortion.
Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 72
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Nurse Bonnie L. McClory was an obstetric technician in the Labor and Delivery unit of what she calls a “large metropolitan hospital.” She was pursuing a nursing degree and taking a class that would prepare her to work on the floor where babies were delivered. Sometimes the babies were delivered alive. Other times, the babies were delivered dead – the victims of saline abortions done at the hospital.
McClory may have hated her job, but she coped with it especially well. She continued working at the hospital and rationalized her role in the abortions. But then there was the abortion that changed everything.
Her assignment was to care for a teenager who went into labor after a saline abortion.
I remember looking at her chart, seeing the usual state required physician certification that the pregnancy was less than 20 weeks… I carried the usual little birth kit into her labor room; we did not bother to open a standard delivery room for an abortion patient.
Before I had time to introduce myself, much less take her vital signs, it was obvious she was about to deliver. I hit the call button to summon help, opened the birth kit, donned my sterile gloves and proceeded to deliver a nearly 4-pound dead baby girl, about 15 inches long, with a full head of hair. I tried to hide the little body from the patient, she saw it, and began screaming. “It’s a baby! My baby! My baby!”
