Fetal research encompasses a broad array of research activities and potential clinical applications. It is ethically controversial because, although it may yield beneficial results, it involves the human organism at a stage of development where its...

In human development, each limb results from a developmental field. The developmental fields are determined during gastrulation. These limb fields are established by the expression of HOX genes. The expression of the factor Tbx-5 causes the limb to...

The primitive gut tube forms during week four of gestation. It derives from the incorporation of the dorsal part of the definitive yolk sac into the embryo due to embryonic folding. The primitive gut is divided into the foregut, midgut, and hindgut....

Throughout intrauterine life, maternal blood supplies the fetus with oxygen and nutrients, and carries away its wastes. The anatomical structures that allow for such an exchange are the umbilical blood vessels. The umbilical vein transports oxygenated...

A fetus (or foetus or fœtus) is a developing mammal or other viviparous vertebrate, after the embryonic stage and before birth. The plural is fetuses, or sometimes feti. In humans, the fetal stage of prenatal development begins about eight weeks after...

A prosecutor said Thursday he will seek the death penalty against a woman accused of cutting a fetus from a friend's womb, killing both.Authorities say Tiffany Hall, 24, also confessed to killing her friend's three children, and St. Clair County State's Attorney Robert Haida said...

A baby sitter charged with murder clubbed a pregnant woman in the head repeatedly with a table leg, then cut her fetus from the womb in a bathtub where she later drowned the victim's three young children, an investigator testified Wednesday.The grisly details in the...

Rejecting an insanity defense, a jury convicted a woman of killing an expectant mother, cutting the baby from her womb and taking the infant home.Jurors deliberated for about four hours Monday before finding Lisa Montgomery, 39, guilty of kidnapping resulting in death in the 2004...

Texas laws allow the killing of a fetus to be prosecuted as murder, regardless of the fetus' stage of development, but they do not apply to abortions, the state's highest criminal court has ruled.Wednesday's ruling by the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected an appeal by...