Fish and Babies (Don't Feel Pain)

For much of the 20th century, babies routinely underwent major surgery without adequate pain relief. Medical doctrine held that infants were too neurologically immature to experience pain in any meaningful way; in practice, many were paralyzed with muscle relaxants while surgery proceeded without anesthesia.

That belief began to collapse in the 1980s, when Dr. Kanwaljeet “Sunny” Anand showed that newborns could feel pain, even three to five times more intensely than adults. Research since then has shown that early pain exposure can carry lifelong physiological and psychological consequences, including altered neurological development, disrupted stress regulation, and PTSD-like symptoms.

Despite decades of evidence and established protocols, avoidable neonatal pain still persists in hospitals around the world. The gap is no longer simply one of knowledge. It is a gap between evidence and practice.

Fish and Babies (Don’t Feel Pain) uses documentary storytelling as a tool to help close that gap. The film connects the unresolved history of infant pain to today’s implementation challenge, bringing together pioneering scientists, clinicians, families, and survivors. Nearly 40 years after the paradigm changed, this project uses film, education, and convening to help make avoidable pain a thing of the past.