Fetal research and antiabortion politics: Holding science hostage.

Revolutionary technical advances in probing, viewing and listening to the pregnant womb, and in culturing and evaluating the products and byproducts of conception, have brought us to the verge of understanding and treating disease processes that have stumped science for decades -- closer, even, to unraveling the secrets of the aging process, and of how cancer begins. Already, human fetal research has resulted in the near elimination of such scourges of childhood as polio, measles, congenital rubella syndrome and Rh disease.

Before development of the new therapeutic techniques made possible by fetal research, just one of these afflictions--Rh blood disease--each year caused 10,000 stillbirths, and severely damaged the brains, bodies or senses of 25,000 babies that were born. The cost-to-benefit ratio alone is staggering: The total amount of money used to support this research is equal to what society is now paying for the lifetime care of just a half-dozen children brain-damaged by Rh disease. (1)

Yet--mainly because of the intrusion of the volatile abortion issue--most fetal research has been halted, at least temporarily, since July 12, 1974, when the National Research Act (P.L. 93-348) was signed into law. That act prohibits the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) from conducting or supporting "research in the United States or abroad on a living human fetus, before or after induced abortion...[except] for the purpose of assuring the [fetus's] survival...." This means, in effect, that virtually all research involving the human fetus has been stopped, because:

* most biomedical research is at least partially funded by DHEW;

* the legislation does not define "living," and most tissue used in research is, in the cellular sense, "live";

* most tissue used in fetal research is from products of abortion; and

* a significant portion of the fetal research in utero has involved women undergoing abortions.