MOTHERS who treat their unborn children to classical music and soft voices may be wasting their time. New research suggests that human babies and other animals are locked in a deep sleep until they are born — and gain little from such experiences.

The research flies in the face of the modern idea that foetuses become sentient and conscious while still in the womb.

Such beliefs have led to mothers being advised to play soothing classical music to their unborn babies. It has also prompted doctors and vets to use relaxant drugs on foetuses when overseeing late-stage abortions or miscarriages. Animal welfare campaigners have campaigned against pregnant animals being sent for slaughter or undergoing veterinary procedures for fear their foetuses will feel pain.

Professor David Mellor, the physiologist who carried out the research, believes such concerns are unwarranted and that foetuses cannot feel anything before or during birth. He will present his findings at a conference on animal sentience that is being organised by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) in London next month.

In a paper that will be published in an academic journal, Mellor will suggest that in mammals the foetal brain is kept in a deep sleep throughout pregnancy by a combination of natural sedatives and anaesthetics secreted by the brain and placenta.

“Consciousness appears for the first time after birth. We conclude the embryo and foetus cannot suffer before or during birth. Suffering can only occur in the newborn when the onset of breathing oxygenates its tissues,” Mellor said.

In his paper Mellor, director of the Animal Welfare, Science and Bioethics Centre at Massey University in New Zealand, will focus on the implications of his research for the welfare of farm animals.

He is writing a second paper about sentience and consciousness in the human foetus, which will be published later.

The research on which Mellor based his findings was carried out on animals, mainly sheep, because it would have been unacceptable and too risky to test on humans. Sheep are, however, widely used as a model for human pregnancies as there are many similarities.

Mellor points out that similar experiments on goat, horse, cattle and monkey foetuses have produced much the same results, suggesting it is a feature of all mammalian pregnancies that foetuses stay deeply unconscious until after they are born.

In the tests, pregnant animals were anaesthetised and operated on to expose their foetuses. Electrical leads that measure brain activity were attached to the foetuses’ heads and they were replaced in the womb.

The researchers recorded brain activity for the rest of the pregnancy — with startling results.

Mellor said: “The electrical activity of the brain was very low early on in pregnancy — just a blank trace. Around halfway, you begin to see occasional spikes suggesting small bursts of activity and then you get increasing but low levels of activity. The electrical activity is never showing a conscious state. It is a sleep-like state.”

He added: “It is only in the last three to four weeks of pregnancy that you begin to see two different traces. There was some thought that the foetus had an awake state but this is not so. There is a period of physical responsiveness when they move around but it is just a form of intermediate sleep.”

Mellor says anatomical studies support his case that such movements — often felt as kicking by human mothers — are a reflex action.

Joyce D’Silva, chief executive of CIWF, said any research that shed light on animal welfare was welcome but expressed caution about Mellor’s conclusions: “Whenever there is any doubt over animals’ welfare, we should act in a way that prevents suffering.”

Experts on human foetal development are cautious about Mellor’s findings. Joe Aquilina, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at St Bartholomew’s and the Royal London hospitals, said the research was controversial because unborn babies were known to respond to pain, so might be conscious.

“It’s difficult to prove whether babies feel pain, but it’s very difficult to prove that they don’t, so the consciousness debate will go on,” he said.

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