Word: fetuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, it settled some issues but stirred up others. One of the most emotion-laden is the morality of medical research on the vastly increased number of fetuses that might be considered available for experimentation because they are going to be aborted. Last year Congress joined the debate and temporarily banned H.E.W. from funding experiments that are not intended to be of benefit to the living fetus before or after abortion. Congress also asked the newly established National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects to set rules for research...
...indisputable" that the fetus, though dependent on the mother, is a separate organism, argued Leon Kass, a physician and professor of "bioethics" at Georgetown University. The fetus is also "human," at least in being "of human origin and in the process of becoming a human being -if nothing interferes." Paul Ramsey, professor of religion at Princeton University, says in his new book, The Ethics of Fetal Research (Yale University Press; $2.95), that the fetus is "live enough not to be dead, not yet mature enough to be an infant, yet a human being enough to deserve protection...
Because of such reasoning, six of the testifying ethicists would rule out virtually all experiments that might harm a fetus, even if it is to be aborted. Ramsey drew an analogy with medical tradition that forbids risk to children and to persons who are condemned to death, irreversibly dying or unconscious...
Here we are spending billions on ways to kill one another with sophisticated weapons and getting upset about a doctor's allowing a fetus to die in Boston. We have no consistency...
...antiabortionists who began this farce don't give two hoots in hell for the life of that fetus. But they needed a goat, and on a certain day in October 1973 it just happened to be Dr. Edelin...