FETUSES would have to be given painkilling drugs during late abortions or for surgery in the womb, under guidelines to be considered by the Government.
Tessa Jowell, the Health Minister, is reviewing medical evidence on foetal pain and will hold a meeting with doctors, scientists and pressure groups wanting the issue formally addressed after the summer recess.
The guidelines would deal with a legal anomaly which protects unborn animals against scientific experiments but allows operations, including abortions, to be performed on human foetuses. They would also acknowledge growing scientific concern that a foetus can feel pain in the last months of pregnancy.
The matter is certain to cause controversy, however, with protest groups determined to use the evidence in anti-abortion campaigns. The guidelines would cover operations such as in utero transfusions, late terminations, and shunt insertions for problems including excess foetal fluid.
Research from University College London disclosed last week showed that newborn babies have a nervous system that makes them respond differently to pain - feeling it longer and more sensitively than adults.
The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology last year issued a report recommending that doctors consider using analgesia and anaesthetics in tests or surgery on the foetus after 24 weeks' gestation.
The new guidelines would recommend that analgesia be used from 20 or even 18 weeks. This would mean that pain relief would have to be given to a foetus before it was aborted.
Under the 1986 Animal (Scientific Procedures) Act, experiments cannot be carried out on animal foetuses from mid-gestation. The law specifically states that this is to protect "any living vertebrate other than man".
There is no law to oblige doctors to protect unborn babies against pain should they be performing an in utero procedure. But Ticky Wright, of the Women and Children's Welfare Fund, said that it had been agreed that rather than try to introduce new legislation, which can take years, there should be Government guidelines.
Dr Vivette Glover, a paediatrician at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, west London, and an expert on the effects of stress on foetuses, said that experts disagreed about when the foetus began to feel pain. "I think it is about 20 weeks but I also think we should err on the side of caution and set the limit at 18 weeks," Dr Glover said. "But it is essential that research is backed, preferably by the Government, to find out the appropriate levels of analgesia, especially if the foetus is going to live."