Doctor Testifies That Fetus's Lungs Were Too Underdeveloped to Breathe

The fetus Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin aborted could not have lived because its lungs were not well enough developed to breathe, an obstetrician testified yesterday at Edelin's manslaughter trial in Boston.

"The maturation of the human lung is not completed until the 26th week." Dr. Charles Hendricks, chairman of the obstetrics department at the University of North Carolina, said.

Edelin is charged in Suffolk County with killing a fetus which the prosecution says was 24 weeks in gestational age and could have lived if Edelin had allowed it to survive the October 1973 operation.

Allen Barnes, former chairman of the Johns Hopkins University department of obstetrics, said a three-minute wait during which Edelin is accused of holding the fetus motionless within the uterus was "perfectly all right."

He said that the delay during which the fetus (was allegedly deprived of oxygen after being separated from the uterine wall, presented "little damage to the mother and no danger to the fetus."

Herdricks said that he has studed the survival rates of 28,000 newborn infants and that not one of them as small as that aborted by Edelin used to go home from the hospital.