Beyond Abortion

A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation

Suzanne Rini

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9781505104554
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

The only book we know on the subject of harvesting fetal organs from living children after they are aborted. Uncovers the network of medical researchers; hidden from public view; whose work seems to be preparing us for a Nazi-like eugenics program; featuring mandatory elimination of the handicapped; before and after birth. The barbarity of this activity beggars description or condemnation! 224 pgs;

1

"The New Barbarians"

No sooner was the fetus denied its personhood in order to permit abortion (in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, 1973) than the biomedical research profession entered the scene with plans to use the human fetus for much-coveted nontherapeutic* human experimentation, generally forbidden under many of civilization's highest codes. Researchers' various specialties and inquiries called for using fetuses at various stages of development and in basically three life situations as they related to the abortion schedule:

The live in-utero fetus. The testing of drugs, of prenatal diagnostic techniques, of vaccines, of hypotheses about the effects of diet, stress, and maternal factors are some of the research objectives for this "class." These types of experiments have two phases: administering the drug, prenatal test, caloric deprivation, etc. to the still-living, in-utero fetus, and then examining the dead fetus, upon abortion, to assess the effects. In some cases, the fetus is actually killed by the experiment rather than by the abortion.

The viable fetus, ex-utero, still living after the abortion. This fetus would be analagous to a premature infant, except that the fetus would not be permitted to survive the experiment, whereas, most premature, wanted infants are helped to independence through medical technology. The viable fetus was included in several early, documented experiments but this class of fetus was disallowed for nontherapeutic experimentation with government funds once federal regulations were devised in 1976. However, these regulations do not govern experiments done with private monies.

The "previable" fetus, ex- or in-utero. This fetus is defined by the federal regulations as one about to be or already aborted (but aborted with some vital signs and therefore living). To meet this criterion, the fetus must be on the abortion schedule up to and including the second trimester, and weigh no more than 400 grams (about one pound). The thinking behind allowing this "class" of fetus for research is that it cannot survive on its own. However, some fetuses have survived with the help of ever-improving medical technology. Additionally, while federal regulations allow nontherapeutic research on these fetuses, most states now disallow it and further demand that any fetus surviving the abortion procedure, viable or not, must be helped to survival.

The dead fetus. Dead means clinically dead, that is, with no vital signs. This category of fetus would be said to be used to gain living tissues. While this is seen by many to be noncontroversial, others believe that it is unethical to use the living matter of these fetuses to benefit medical inquiry because they are not simply random victims, such as those of murder or accidents but are, rather, part of an entire class of human being denied intrinsic rights. The use of this class spurs the analogy of use of the body parts and tissues of concentration camp victims by the Nazis for anything from "medical progress" to soap and lampshades.

The outraged reader may ask if there are laws against this. There are, in fact, government regulations (not laws) and medical ethics codes that permit it. Strangely, there are also some state laws that forbid it; these seem, on the basis of evidence to be presented, to be equivocal and largely unenforced. For instance, in Massachusetts, live nontherapeutic experimentation and experimentation on dead fetuses is forbidden, unless by parental consent. Opponents of fetal research say that, according to such long-enduring standards as the Nuremberg Code and the Helsinki Accords, no human subject may be entered into nontherapeutic research unless the subject him- or herself gives consent. Thus, parental consent under such a rule is void, especially when the parent, in opting for abortion, has canceled guardianship over and care of the subject. But supporters of fetal research favor another facet of the Nuremberg Code that may be extremely persuasive in a society more and more used to medical progress. This Nuremberg article states that "The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, [and be] unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature." It is not hard for the reader to see that, in order to go forward, fetal experimentation has had to sacrifice the former article to the latter. In doing so, opponents of fetal experimentation believe that the human fetus, on the sole basis of its being unwanted and doomed to abortion, has been separated from all other human subjects of experimentation and subjected to procedures forbidden for all other humans, whether they are condemned to death or not.

A spectrum of fetal research is funded by a phalanx of the country's most sacred cows, who distribute copious monies to projects both here and abroad. Some of this research is currently confined to animal fetuses, but the agenda includes moving up to human ones once the data suggests that the animal models have been exhausted. Funders include the U.S. government's various agencies, mainly the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD, formerly under HEW, which is now the Department of Health and Human Services). Other government funders are the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and—the most bizarre example—the military. Private funders have included the MacDonald's Kroc Medical Foundation, the Ford Foundation, The Muscular Dystrophy Association, the American Paralysis Association, the National Foundation/March of Dimes, and others.

Fetal experimentation has very many supporters. It also has an equal and opposing force who say that it should be universally forbidden in all of its forms. The latter view has been losing badly.

The particular, curious set of ethics favoring fetal use and experimentation is not common public knowledge today. Fetal experimentation and the debate surrounding it have been handled by the medical and academic elite. What has been missing is public disclosure and public participation.

The set of ethics supporting experimentation has been built around the supposed necessity of using the previable fetus who has survived the abortion process, or who has been arranged to be freshly dead for organ and tissue harvest. The medical researchers who support experimentation have tried to class these fetuses as "tissue." Their logic goes like this: the fetus cannot survive, therefore we can use it; and, since it cannot survive, it is merely a piece of tissue. It seems, however, that many researchers themselves admit that the living, previable fetus is not just a piece of tissue. Consider the remark of David G. Nathan in the Villanova Law Review¹:

The possibility that investigators might perform or tolerate ghastly intrauterine intrusions prior to abortion because they do not think of the fetus as a person, creates deep moral and ethical concerns. Indeed, a few of my colleagues occasionally lend some credence to that fear by referring to the fetus as just "a piece of tissue." Obviously the fetus is not just any piece of tissue. The fetus may not be a person in the legal sense, but common sense and dignity elevate it above the status of a gallbladder. The potential of a gallbladder is to become an older gallbladder, whereas the fetus has the potential to become a person.

He referred mainly to the fetus prior to abortion, but the word "tissue" has been used by researchers—who obviously know better than anyone—to refer to previable fetuses who have survived abortion, upon whom the researchers wish to experiment. Under current federal regulations, one may do anything except a procedure that directly stops the heartbeat.² But it is quite possible to remove vital organs, even the heart, without stopping the heartbeat directly. Researchers themselves have proven that.

For one example, we turn to the May 15, 1983, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. A letter from Drs. Bela Resch and Julius Papp was headlined "Effects of Caffeine on the Heart."³ Resch and Papp, who had been doing the same horrendous experiments since 1973,⁴ opened their letter with comments on a recent article in the Journal, "Caffeine and the Fetus: Is Trouble Brewing?" Their letter stated that "This [the known effects of caffeine] prompted us to study the responsiveness to caffeine in seven hearts isolated surgically from healthy human fetuses at legal termination of pregnancy." In an earlier report to the Journal,⁵ they had put it even more graphically: "The hearts were dissected from the fetuses and were mounted in a thermostatically controlled bath containing modified Locke's solution gassed with 5 percent carbon dioxide in a 95 percent oxygen at a pH 7.4 . . . "

The U.S. regulations do not state that a previable fetus must be void of heartbeat before being dissected or experimented on. Researchers may kindly wait for a fetus to die, but they don't have to. By comparison, Australia's recently passed regulations (1984) explicitly state, as the American ones do not, that researchers must wait for a cessation of heartbeat before dissection. Besides being dissected for parts, under the U.S. regulations, a previable fetus may be observed, measured, have skin samples taken, all while the fetus is dying on the table.

The U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision on abortion (1973), although it never ruled on fetal experimentation at all, did say that the mother's rights cease to prevail once the fetus is expelled from the womb, and that with life outside the womb comes constitutional protection in full. Did the Court mean this to apply to fetuses that are previable as well as to those that are viable? Researchers have taken full advantage of the Court's error in not expanding its vision to take into account the phenomenon of fetal experimentation; it could have, because nontherapeutic experimentation on abortion victims began wholeheartedly in the late 1960's when states began to remove legal restrictions on abortion. The researchers have also tended to ignore the dichotomous, controversial fact that many states have a categorical ban on all nontherapeutic fetal experimentation and also frequently demand that every survivor of abortion be given medical assistance.

John P. Wilson, in the Villanova Law Review article cited earlier,⁶ took up the question of whether or not the Supreme Court meant to protect the nonviable fetus ex utero as well as the viable one when either survives the abortion process:

No doubt because the [Supreme Court] opinion focused on the right of a mother to obtain an abortion, almost no notice was taken of the status of a fetus following induced or spontaneous birth. The majority opinion noted that "the law has been reluctant to endorse any theory that life . . . begins before live birth." The term "live birth" was not defined, and the Court did not indicate whether the concept was in any way tied to viability.

Thus there is a great loophole in the Supreme Court decision, and researchers have rushed into it. Confusion reigns. For instance, California has a law that applies to fetal experimentation; it says that any fetus that survives the abortion procedure, regardless of viability or nonviability, must be given all of the helps given any premature infant. Yet in Massachusetts, in 1975, when Dr. Kenneth Edelin killed a live infant (not yet expelled from the womb) that had survived an abortion, he was first convicted by a jury and then, on appeal, exonerated by a superior court, which held that since the fetus was not viable, there was no law that forbade what he did.

Not only has the legal status of the previable fetus been left lying in the loophole, but no cases have, to this writer's knowledge, been heard concerning the researcher's design to produce a live fetus via abortion—a subject we shall take up in detail.

In all the ethical arguments over fetal experimentation, nowhere is there a statement quite like one from Dr. Paul Gill, Chairman of the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh and working pathologist at Magee–Women's Hospital. Dr. Gill was frank and fierce, with volatile words for those who would protest nontherapeutic fetal research. If the opposition wins out, said Dr. Gill, "It would be a victory for the new barbarians."⁷ To prove that research involving the fetus is necessary and not at all exploitation, as opponents say, of a caught and dehumanized class, he added, "The major source of medical advance has always come from research on tissues. The developing fetus is the developing situation. It's a developing human."⁸

This was exactly the thinking of researchers who in 1975 starved pregnant women who were going to abort their babies. The researchers did this to study the effects of malnutrition on fetuses. The results of their research were published in an article titled "The Dutch Famine." At that date there was a ban on all federally funded fetal experimentation, to give time for a special commission to debate the necessity and ethics of experimentation and to propose guidelines to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, who would decide whether to adopt them. Obviously the researchers who perpetrated the cruelties of the Dutch Famine were not influenced by the consciousness raising that the commission was supposed to be inspiring at that moment. The term "consciousness raising" was used by a spokesman for the March of Dimes, R.P. Leavitt, to express his impression that the commission hearings were having that very effect on researchers.

The March of Dimes did not fund the Dutch Famine, but it too was contributing funds that were used to support live fetal experimentation during the ban on federal funding. Nor was the Dutch Famine experim...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Printing
• 1. "The New Barbarians"
• 2. A Catalogue of Fetal Use
• 3. The Federal Regulations on Nontherapeutic Fetal Experimentation
• 4. How Live Aborted Fetuses Are Obtained for Research
• 5. Abandonment of the Fetus as Patient and Client
• 6. Extermination of the Handicapped Unborn
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: "On the Nature of Men" by Jerome Lejeune
• Appendix B: "The Foetus as a Personality" by A. W. Liley
• Notes
• About the Author