The Reagan administration's top health official said Thursday he will not take a position on a proposed White House ban on using intentionally aborted fetal tissue for medical treatment until a National Institutes of Health advisory committee has completed its review of the issue. Health and Human Services Secretary Otis R. Bowen told reporters that _ while he remains personally opposed to abortion _ ``there are some good pros and some good cons'' about using aborted fetal tissue for experimental treatment for Parkinson's and other diseases. He said ``a task force of the best minds going'' was studing the issue at a three-day NIH meeting and that he had no intention of taking a position until the review is completed, probably not for several weeks. Bowen said he could not predict whether the issue will be resolved during the last few months of the Reagan administration even though a White House official, Gary Bauer, is pushing for quick implementation of an outright ban. ``Inasmuch as abortions are legal, being unable to utilize the tissue ... would result in the waste of a resource that is livesaving and curing for several diseases,'' Bowen told reporters at a breakfast meeting. He spoke at about the same time the NIH panel he referred to was opening a second day of hearings to focus on moral and ethical issues. Bowen said it was his judgment that ``we can't in a good common sense way come up with an answer until we hear'' from the advisory panel. ``If I had Parkinson's I think I would want some of those (transplanted) cells,'' said Bowen, emphasizing that such a personal observation does not eliminate the broader ethical questions. He made clear he did not feel rushed to recommend an administration position even though a Bauer memo disclosed in news accounts last week instructed Bowen to make his comments by last Friday. ``We have not responded,'' Bowen said. ``I do not know whether it was a direct order from the president and I don't know that I will know unless someone tells me.'' Procedurally, the special NIH committee will make its recommendations to a standing NIH advisory committee Dec. 1 and that panel in turn will make a recommendation to NIH Director James B. Wyngaarden. The NIH director reports to Bowen through Dr. Robert E. Windom who ordered a temporary ban on federally financed fetal tissue research pending consideration of moral and ethical issues. Father Don McCarthy, a Roman Catholic church leader from Cincinnati, told the NIH committee the issue draws a clear distinction between induced abortions and natural abortions. ``One might say that the American public becomes accomplices after the fact for these induced abortions'' if its institutions embrace policies that could tend to assign a medical value to having an abortion, he said. Several witnesses and committee members used the term ``custom pregnancy'' as short hand for the concern that a woman might become pregnant just to produce a fetus for abortion and subsequent research use _ either for financial reward or in hopes of helping a sick relative. ``I don't think people are as callous about abortion as that premise suggests,'' said Thomas H. Murray, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. ``If we get to that point, I'm deeply worried.'' Murray said he was convinced that guidelines could be drawn to insure that a woman's decision to have an abortion would be kept totally separate from the decision to allow the remains to be used for research. Robert J. Levine of the Yale University School of Medicine told the committee his institution has drawn its own guidelines that would exclude transplanting the tissue of an fetus into a relative of the mother. He said that was done out of safety considerations _ that whatever caused the disease in the relative might somehow be present in the offspring's genes _ but coincidentally also serves to negate concern about ``custom pregnancies.'' Ezra C. Davidson Jr., head of the obstetrics and gynecology department at King-Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, said he was distressed that some committee members seemed to underestimate ``the intensity of the drive for (many) women to have abortions to resolve a very complex set of problems'' without any encouragement from researchers or others. ``I just wish I had the capacity to translate the reality of that to the people in this room,'' he said.
