Suchergebnisse

Sir Dugald Baird sketches the history of abortion legislation in Great Britain from the beginning of the century. In his views the 1967 Abortion Act has been one of the most important and beneficial pieces of social legislation enacted in Britain in the last 100 years. It has, however, brought problems both of administration in the hospitals and to individual doctors and nurses, particularly when the patients are young single women and even schoolgirls. One of the consequences of the Abortion Act has been a fall in maternal mortality and perinatal mortality rates. Abortion does not seem to be followed by serious emotional sequelae. Nevertheless recent changes in sexual mores have introduced new and serious social problems which are discussed in relation to the role of the doctor in his relationship with patients seeking abortion.

There is no need to have a workshop to show that fertility falls with age. Nothing works so well as it gets older. One has only to look at the progression of one's teeth, a very visible manifestation of the process of ageing, to make one wonder what goes on inside the reproductive system!Probably there is no evolutionary disadvantage to having reduced fertility with age because by the time that there is a significant reduction in fecundity the genetic pool which will be added to subsequent generations has already been added. In biological terms, there may be a positive advantage in reduced fertility in older women, since the human infant is dependent on its parents for such a relatively long time and there may be an advantage in the mother surviving for 7, 8, 9 or 10 years after her youngest child is born. In looking for a teleological explanation of declining fertility with age and of a menopause, this is one possible explanation.

The use of human fetal tissue for scientific research has enormous potential but is subject to government legislation. In the United Kingdom the Polkinghorne Committee's guidelines were accepted by the Department of Health in 1990. These guidelines set out to protect women undergoing termination of pregnancy from exploitation but in so doing may significantly restrict potential research. Although the committee took evidence from a wide variety of experts they did not seek the views of the general public. We asked 108 women about to have a therapeutic abortion; 167 women who had had a pregnancy terminated in the past, and 419 women who had never had an abortion, their views on research using human fetal tissue. Regardless of their past experiences the women were overwhelmingly in favour of research using fetal tissue (94 per cent). They made little distinction between basic research and research with obvious clinical relevance and supported the concept of using transplanted fetal tissue for the treatment of adult disease such as Parkinsonism. Women about to undergo an abortion were significantly more likely (p < 0.001) to approve of all types of research including that aimed at improving methods of abortion and research using live fetuses in utero.