Word: fetal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...doctors are offering an alternative: aborting some of the fetuses in order to save the others. So far, fewer than 100 women have undergone the procedure, called fetal reduction, at a handful of U.S. hospitals. Usually performed before the twelfth week of pregnancy, it requires that the doctor pierce the mother's abdomen with a needle and, guided by an ultrasound image, inject a lethal drug into the fetus. It dies within minutes. The remaining infants, usually two, then have a much improved chance of developing normally...
Those results have not dampened the ethical debate over the practice. Says Dr. John Willke of the National Right to Life Committee: "Fetal reduction is the thinly veiled killing of unwanted babies." But both Wapner and Dr. Richard Berkowitz, head of the Mt. Sinai team, insist that the vast majority of patients come to them for medical reasons, not social ones...
Medical researchers have recently succeeded in treating people with such chronic diseases as diabetes and Parkinson's with transplants of human fetal tissue. So far, doctors in the U.S. have used fetuses only in experimental transplants on laboratory animals suffering from conditions mimicking human ailments. Most such research in federal labs came to an abrupt halt last week. The Reagan Administration banned the use of intentionally aborted fetal tissue by Government scientists until an outside panel can examine the ethical implications of the practice. Experiments involving tissue obtained from miscarriages can proceed...
...move, applauded by abortion foes, was prompted by a National Institutes of Health proposal to treat Parkinson's patients with fetal brain tissue, a technique used for the first time by physicians in Mexico City last January. Reaction to the moratorium ranged from outrage to cautious endorsement. "A complete ban really blocks the prospects of investigating what could be a promising medical procedure," says Dr. Robert Burke, a neurologist at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. A better approach, he thinks, would be to allow research in a few supervised institutions to continue while the debate on the ethical...
Medical tests, overused and too often inaccurate, are a costly tool in the hands of many doctors. -- A ban on fetal- tissue research...