The review by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, was made as advocates are pushing for fetal pain laws aimed at curtailing abortion. Proposed federal legislation would require doctors to provide fetal pain information to women seeking abortions when fetuses are at least 20 weeks old, and to offer women fetal anesthesia at that stage of the pregnancy. A handful of states have approved similar measures.
But the report, appearing in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, says that offering fetal 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, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University and a board director at the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, said the article ''will help to develop some consensus" on when fetuses feel pain. ''To date, there hasn't been any," she said.
The researchers reviewed dozens of studies and medical reports and said the data indicate that fetuses probably are incapable of feeling pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy, when they are about 28 weeks old.
Although brain structures involved in feeling pain begin forming much earlier, research indicates that they probably do not function until the pregnancy's final stages, said Dr. Mark Rosen, an obstetric anesthesiologist at UCSF and the report's senior author.
Based on the evidence, discussions of fetal 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 contention that the report is biased.
Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA's editor in chief, said the decision to publish the review was not politically motivated. ''Oh, please," DeAngelis said. ''If I had a political agenda, I wouldn't pick fetal pain."
