Fetal Position

Changing public attitudes and a recent Supreme Court decision have removed most of the legal bars to abortion. But many of the ethical questions about the procedure remain unsolved. For the past several years, a study group of the National Institutes of Health has been working on a set of guidelines covering the use of aborted fetuses for research purposes. Last week, in the wake of a furor created by public reaction to this proposal, the NIH bypassed its panel and recommended instead a code that would effectively prohibit all research on aborted fetuses in the U.S.

The original guideline proposals would have extended to fetuses in utero the NIH ban on any possibly harmful research involving human beings.

But they would not have accorded such protection to fetuses that had been aborted. The proposed rules spelled out conditions under which experiments -- including the temporary maintenance of life by means of an artificial placenta -- could be conducted on them. Some research physicians feel that such experiments could give them valuable in formation on the causes of miscarriage as well as the effects on the fetus of drugs taken by pregnant women. Others believe that the opportunity to study live fetal tissue, which grows rapidly, might help them to understand better the uncontrolled multiplication of cancer cells.

Outcry. The public outcry over fetal research began last spring, when Oh. Gyn. News, a semimonthly newsletter for obstetricians and gynecologists, reported that the NIH was nearing a decision that would permit funding of such projects. The story generated a storm of controversy among physicians, scientists, lawyers and theologians, many of whom argued that aborted fetuses are beings so close to living humans that the idea of experimenting on them is morally repugnant. Nowhere did it arouse more anger than at the exclusive Stone Ridge Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, Md. A group of students there, including the 17-year-old daughter of former Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Sargent Shriver, asked school authorities for permission to protest the proposed rules by picketing NIH.

When they learned of the students' plans, NIH officials offered to meet with them instead, and the result of the parley was total capitulation. Apparently deciding that public attitudes are unalterably opposed to experimentation, the NIH declared emphatically that it "does not now support research on live aborted human fetuses and does not contemplate approving the support of such research."

The revised guidelines, which must still be approved by NIH Director Dr Robert S. Stone and the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, ban all experiments involving women about to undergo abortions if they might harm the fetus, and prohibit any experiments that would prolong the life of an abort ed fetus once its ultimate survival is judged to be impossible. Few research ers are expected to violate the ban, which applies to any American scientist receiving NIH support. Anyone who does can lose federal support for all other research he may be conducting.

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