Harvard Experimenters Denounce Bill Limiting Research on Aborted Fetuses

Boston doctors forged a compromise with state legislators Monday on a proposed law that would limit research on human fetuses, but Harvard experimenters said yesterday that even those modified restrictions are too severe.

The legislature will consider the proposals this week. Unlike the first draft, the final bill allows doctors to perform experiments on tissue from dead fetuses, including those obtained through intentional abortions.

Restricted Administration

However, the measures would not allow researchers to administer drugs to pregnant women who do not need them medically, then induce abortion in an attempt to determine the extent to which the drug is passed on to the fetus.

This is exactly the operation carried out by Harvard pathologists in an experiment last June, the results of which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The researchers involved--Dr. Leon D. Sabath '52, associate professor of Medicine, and Dr. Leonard D. Berman, assistant professor of Pathology--have already been indicted on a separate charge under a 19th-century grave-robbing statute forbidding "illegal dissection."

Berman yesterday labeled the proposed law "absolutely absurd."

"If an abortion is the termination of pregnancy to the detriment of the fetus, then what does it matter what is done to it before abortion?" Berman said. "It isn't sensitive and doesn't feel pain."

No Discomfort

He added that pregnant women who consented to take drugs tolerated the administrations "without any discomfort or pain."

Sabath said the bill is "destructive to the interests of humanity and the potential gains of science."

Dr. Kenneth J. Ryan, Ladd Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, assisted legislators Monday in the second draft of the bill.

Ryan said yesterday that provisions to allow experimentation on dead fetuses were "the best accommodations for research we could obtain considering the people's sensibility around here."

Officials from the National Right to Life Committee Inc., which has supported tighter restrictions on fetal research, were not available for comment yesterday.

However, The Boston Evening Globe yesterday quoted Dr. Mildred F. Jefferson, a surgeon and vice chairman of the committee, as saying that the intent of such legislation "is to make sure advances of science are not made at the expense of society."

Sabath said last night that such research as he performed would now depend to a greater extent on experimental animals.

"However, a point comes when you have to learn something peculiar to humans by experimenting on humans," he said.

Sabath said he was encouraged by the fact that the bill's original clause barring research on fetuses from induced abortions was dropped.

"Such a major revision makes me optimistic that people will become informed as to how important this is," he said