Paving the Way to Exploit Poor Women for Their Eggs
The calls are growing to open the door to markets in human eggs. The Telegraph has reported that Dr David Adamson, the president-elect of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, has called for opening the doors wide to purchasing eggs for use in IVF. Eggs are also needed for each effort at human cloning, and the calls are being heard to permit biotechnologists to buy eggs.
So, this is the situation. If people like Dr. Adamson get their way, poor women are going to be enticed--and some already are being enticed--to risk their health, their fertility, and in a few cases, even their lives to help rich parents with fertility problems give birth and/or to facilitate human cloning in which Big Biotech hopes to make a bonanza on the technology.
If we ever get to the point that we need millions of eggs, rather than just thousands, it could spark a neo colonialism in which biotech companies exploit the world's poorest women for their body parts. We should do all we can to prevent poor women from becoming mere commodities.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:01 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
I was going to ask you a question off topic if you were posting on something else but you happen to be posting on the same topic again. A poster on a thread on this topic wrote:
"You can get all the embryonic stem cells you want from those that go unused in the case of in vitro fertilization. Countless really. Nobody has to go prostituting themselves for it to happen either."
I was wondering what you would reply to this. By the way, I started the thread at arn.org on ESCR based on a comments you made on a radio interview you posted
recently.
The statement takes a tremendous amount on faith. One potential way out of the "egg dearth" for cloning is to try and morph ES cells into eggs. An egg-like cell has been seen in animal studies.
Whether this can be done, remains to be seen. Beyond that, whether the eggs would be workable, remains to be seen. Beyond that, you might have to mature them, and how that could be done remains to be seen.
Another potential way out of the egg problem is to use ovaries from late term aborted female fetuses. Experiments in this regard are happening in the Netherlands and Israel. Whether that will work and whether they can be matured remains to be seen. Ditto taking eggs from women's cadavers or from ovary extractions.
Scientists in UK want to use rabbit eggs.
The drive for eggs is a very real problem in biotech and it may distort the science and our ethics very badly.
Thank you.
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