JAMA Editor "Unaware" Abortion Advocates Wrote Fetal Pain Study

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 25, 2005

San Francisco, CA (LifeNews.com) -- The fallout from a study published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association by two abortion advocates claiming unborn children don't feel pain from abortions until late in pregnancy continues.
Now, JAMA's editor says she was "unaware" that the authors of the report include an abortion practitioner and a former staffer for a leading abortion advocacy group.

The lead author of the study is Susan J. Lee, a University of California at San Francisco medical student who once worked for NARAL, an abortion advocacy group that recently came under fire for falsely accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of backing abortion-related violence.

Meanwhile, another author, UCSF obstetrician-gynecologist Eleanor Drey, is the medical director of the abortion center at San Francisco General Hospital.

JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis told Knight Ridder News she was unaware that the two authors are intimately involved in the abortion movement. She acknowledged that revelation could hurt the credibility of the publication.

"This is the first I've heard about it," she told the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. "We ask them to reveal any conflict of interest. I would have published" the disclosure of the abortion ties if it had been made.

Drey, the abortion practitioner, defends her participation in the study.

"We thought it was critical to include an expert in abortion among the authors," she told Knight Ridder. "I think my presence ... should not serve to politicize a scholarly report."

Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand of the University of Arkansas Medical Center says the report is biased. He said he and other specialists in development of unborn children have shown that babies feel pain before birth as early as 20 weeks into the pregnancy.

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