British scientist says US anti-abortion lawyers misused his work to attack Roe v Wade

Giandomenico Iannetti, a professor of neuroscience, says his work was used in ‘a very clever way to prove a point’. Photograph: Giulio Origlia/Getty Images

A University College London scientist has accused lawyers in the US of misusing his groundbreaking work on the brain to justify the dismantling of Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling that legalised abortion nationally in America.

Giandomenico Iannetti said his research, which used imaging to understand the adult brain’s response to pain, had been wrongly interpreted to make an anti-abortion argument.