Foetuses 'don't feel pain'

2005-08-24 15:19

Lindsey Tanner

Chicago - A review of medical evidence has found that foetuses likely don't feel pain until the final months of pregnancy, a powerful challenge to abortion opponents who hope that discussions about foetal pain will make women think twice about ending pregnancies.

Critics angrily disputed the findings and claimed the report is biased.

"They have literally stuck their hands into a hornet's nest," said Dr Kanwaljeet Anand, a foetal pain researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who believes foetuses as young as 20 weeks old feel pain.

The review by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco comes as advocates are pushing for foetal pain laws aimed at curtailing abortion.

Proposed federal legislation would require doctors to provide foetal pain information to women seeking abortions when foetuses are at least 20 weeks old, and to offer women foetal anaesthesia at that stage of the pregnancy.

But the report, appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, says that offering foetal pain relief during abortions in the fifth or sixth months of pregnancy is misguided and might result in unacceptable health risks to women.

Dr Nancy Chescheir, chairperson of obstetrics and gynaecology at Vanderbilt University and a board director at the Society of Maternal-Foetal Medicine, said the article "will help to develop some consensus" on when foetuses feel pain.

Pregnancy's final stages

"To date, there hasn't been any."

The researchers reviewed dozens of studies and medical reports and said the data indicate that foetuses likely are incapable of feeling pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy, when they are about 28 weeks old.

While brain structures involved in feeling pain begin forming much earlier, research indicates they likely do not function until the pregnancy's final stages, said the report's senior author, UCSF obstetric anaesthesiologist Dr Mark Rosen.

Based on the evidence, discussions of foetal pain for abortions performed before the end of the second trimester should not be mandatory, the researchers said.

The authors include the administrator of a UCSF abortion clinic, but the researchers dispute the claim that the report is biased.

Dr Catherine DeAngelis, Jama's editor-in-chief, said the decision to publish the review was not politically motivated.

The measure would affect about 18 000 US abortions a year performed in the fifth month of pregnancy or later, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. He said the review is slanted.

But Rosen said the researchers "tried to review the literature in an unbiased fashion. This was a multidisciplinary effort by experts on anaesthesia, neuroanatomy, obstetrics and neonatal development."

On the net:

jama.ama-assn.org

- AP