fish and babies (don’t feel pain)

DOCUMENTARY   |   IN DEVELOPMENT

For decades, medical doctrine held that newborns couldn’t feel pain—a belief so entrenched that babies routinely underwent major surgery without anesthesia, paralyzed only by muscle relaxants while fully conscious. This practice, affecting millions of infants worldwide from the 1940s through the 1980s, crumbled when a young researcher named Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand discovered that babies actually had stress responses three to five times greater than adults during surgery. His groundbreaking studies sparked a medical revolution, but the story doesn’t end there. Today, as fetal surgery pushes the boundaries of when life begins and artificial intelligence transforms pain assessment, the fundamental question of consciousness and suffering in our most vulnerable patients remains as complex as ever.

This international documentary follows the paradigm shift that changed modern medicine and explores how we continue to grapple with measuring pain in those who cannot speak for themselves—from the pioneers who challenged medical orthodoxy to the survivors still living with the consequences of a system that once believed fish and babies were equally incapable of feeling pain.