Word: fetus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...brave new science of reproductive technology has been a mixed blessing for childless couples. Women who were once told they might never conceive are now able to become pregnant. But fertility drugs or surgery can produce three or four, sometimes even eight or nine, fetuses. Not only does such a pregnancy threaten the mother's health, but each extra fetus increases the risk of miscarriage or premature birth, which can cause an infant's death or irreparable brain damage. In a widely publicized 1985 case, Californian Patti Frustaci gave birth prematurely to septuplets; only three survived...
...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...
...brain. Like virtually all anencephalics, she could not have survived more than a few days outside the womb; unlike most, Gabriel died before her healthy organs deteriorated. Then, early in January, surgeons in Mexico City announced that for the first time, they had successfully grafted tissue from a miscarried fetus into the brains of two Parkinson's victims, who have since improved dramatically...
...prevent such abuses, doctors and ethicists suggest banning the sale of fetal tissue worldwide and prohibiting women from designating who would receive their fetus' organs. Once such safeguards are in place, however, they believe that physicians can properly use tissue from abortuses for research and treatment. Except in the case of miscarriages, Dr. John Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee, vehemently disagrees. "The abuse is not in the sale of those tissues," he says, "but in killing the baby in the first place." Janice Raymond, professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst...
...seventh week of embryonic growth, reported Chief Researcher David Page, the presence of the TDF gene appears to launch a process that leads to male sexual development; without it, the fetus will be female. The scientists, whose findings appear in the Dec. 24 issue of the journal Cell, caution that the evidence is still circumstantial, and the discovery will have no immediate application. Even so, says UCLA Geneticist Larry Shapiro, "they have begun to unravel one of the most complex mysteries of biology. We have a long way to go, but this is certainly a major step along...