September 9, 2005

Conflict Accusations in Fetal-Pain Study

By LILA GUTERMAN

An anti-abortion organization has accused researchers at the University of California at San Francisco of bias for not revealing their ties to abortion-rights groups in a paper about fetal pain published in late August in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But the researchers argue that no conflict of interest exists.

The paper reviewed published studies and concluded that "fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester." The article promptly became a