A new bill introduced into the California legislature would lift the ban on paying women for their eggs
AB 926, the Reproductive Health and Research Bill, says that to encourage reproductive health and research in the state, women need to be compensated for “donating” their eggs, a hot commodity in the embryonic stem cell research and infertility arenas....
So why would California want more women to go through such a process just for research purposes? AB 926 gives a list of research that would benefit from having more human eggs, which includes reducing the high volume of multiple pregnancies in IVF. But there is some very disturbing verbiage in AB 926 including the assertion that research will benefit from the intentional creation of excess embryos.
Eggsploitation is a new documentary by the Center for Bioethics and Culture about the exploitation of woman's bodies for the lucrative fertility industry. Check out the trailer and the website:
Most woman do not realize how valuable they are. I am not talking about cooking, cleaning, raising the kids while bringing home the bacon. I am talking about their biology.
Dr. Hwang Woo-suk, the disgraced cloning researcher who claimed he cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells, was convicted this week of embezzlement and was given a two-year suspended sentence. In my estimation, Dr. Hwang's major crime was not his fraudulent paper, or his misappropriation of funds. It was his exploitation of female researchers in his lab for their eggs. Cloning takes eggs, lots of them. Donating eggs is not easy and has resulted in infertility and even death. Whether female researchers in his lab were pressured to donate eggs or not, this was a huge breach of ethics.
Dr. Hwang's return to the spotlight reminded me that cutting edge biotechnology, especially in the reproductive arena, is a woman's issue. Embryonic stem cell research and research cloning cannot continue without the precious eggs that reside in our ovaries. In the future, reproductive cloning and genetic engineering of children cannot go anywhere without our wombs to gestate scientists' latest creations. All of these come with significant risks for the woman whose biology is so essential.
Some would say that compensation is sufficient to insure that woman are not exploited by the biotechnology machine. I disagree. I call compensation for surrogacy and egg donation high-tech prostitution that preys on low income women. Too many scientists view women as banks of harvestable biological material that they regrettably have to pay for.
Recently, Dr. Sam Wood of Stemagen Corp. said he wants to pay women to harvest their eggs. He cries that he can't get them any other way. Forget about the health risks to young women, Dr. Wood wants the eggs to continue to pursue therapeutic cloning.
"Give us the eggs. If we don't succeed, then be critical," said Wood. "You have to give people the tools that are required to determine whether the methodology will work."
Once again the ends justify the means, the only problem is that he is talking about young women putting their fertility and health at risk to supply him with raw material for his cloning experiments.
I think some men just do not get that donating eggs is NOT like donating sperm. I will go one further and say that if they required the harvesting of sperm cells directly from the testicles with hormone injections and needles, embryonic stem cell research and cloning would still be science fiction. Guaranteed.
One of my favorite quotes on cloning is this one from Dr. Gregory Pence, bioethicist from the University of Alabama, where he nonchalantly talks about what it would take to make reproductive cloning a reality:
"If the primary moral objection to reproductive cloning is that it will likely result in genetic error in reprogramming, then of course we want research to prevent that kind of problem. But how do we do that? The best way is to see how cloned embryos develop and to study them, gestating them in female chimpanzees, artificial wombs, or human volunteers, then aborting them to see which are normal and which are not, then experimenting to see how to create only normally developing embryos/fetuses."
Dr. Pence those "human volunteers" are real women who would be putting their own fertility and mental and physical health at risk by not only carrying a cloned fetus, but also going through an elective abortion in the name of science.
Even pro-lifers are not above falling into the women as "harvestable biological material" trap. Remember Dr. William Hurlbut from Stanford who proposed Altered Nuclear Transfer with Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming (ANT-OAR) as an alternative to cloning for generating patient specific embryonic stem cells? Thirty five heavyweight pro-life academics, including Fr. Thomas Berg and Fr. Tad Pacholczyksigned a statement endorsing ANT-OAR. The problem? The oocyte part. Oocyte means egg and ANT-OAR would require human eggs just like cloning. ANT-OAR would have required the same number, if not more, women to donate eggs to satisfy this technique's need for eggs.
It is exactly the egg and embryo problem that has caused some stem cell researchers to abandon embryonic stem cell research and cloning altogether and work with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) instead. IPS cells require no embryos or eggs and still behave like embryonic stem cells. These iPS cells would also be a genetic match to the patient so there would be no need for cloning.
This is why should women care about biotechnology. Because it is their bodies that will be exploited to make some of the visions of scientists come to fruition. If we do not provide the raw materials, embryonic stem cell research and cloning cannot proceed and more alternatives like iPS cells will be found. Women need to stand up and say, "Find another way." Some have already. Hand Off Our Ovaries, of which I am a member, is a group of pro-choice and pro-life women and men who realize how advances in biotechnology will exploit vulnerable women.
Do your daughters a favor. Teach them about biotechnology, the good and the bad. Make sure they understand how valuable their bodies are. Teach them how egg donation and surrogacy work and the risks involved. Make sure they understand how not to fall victim to exploitation in the Brave New World.
From the UK's Daily Mail. A reporter advertises that she is looking for egg donors for IVF and she gets some pretty interesting responses:
Pick me and you will be getting a winning, and rare, combination of brains and beauty. I am often told I look like Catherine Zeta-Jones, and I've never been anything other than a straight A student. To be blunt, I doubt you will find anybody better...
These are the confident words of Sarah, 26, the proud owner of a first-class English degree from Edinburgh University. She goes on to talk about her size 8 figure, her fluency in French and how widely travelled she is.
It may read like a Miss World contestant's speech, or an online dating profile - but, in fact, Sarah is offering to sell me her eggs illegally for £12,000.
All of this reproductive technology does not turn women in commodities at all does it? Case in point look at these the responses:
Ellie, from North London, is much more blunt in her approach. 'My partner and I have both recently lost our jobs in the City,' she says. 'There's absolutely nothing out there and we are in real danger of losing our home....
Davina, 21, from Cirencester, is yet another student to contact me. She has thoroughly researched what is involved and asks me to call her to discuss options.
The phone is answered by a polite, well-spoken woman who tells me that she is trying to become an actress, but is struggling to find work. Her agent has advised her that she needs to have new photographs taken and to pay for a professional show reel.
'My only fear would be that my own fertility would be compromised,' confesses Davina. 'But if your clinic would reassure me that I would not be at risk, then I would happily donate.
Unfortunately, Davina you will be putting your fertility at risk:
This is the sort of nightmare scenario that Josephine Quintavalle, director of Core Ethics, a public interest and lobby group concerned with reproductive techniques, fears most....
'I am in contact with a 31-year-old woman who offered her eggs for donation and suffered ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome as a result. She is now in early menopause and infertile herself. Not only that, she is unable to walk and in a wheelchair.
And not surprising the women who offer to sell their eggs are ignoring the ultimate consequences of donating their sex cells, the resulting children:
After a week of dealing with various potential donors, an alarming reality hit me: not one of those women had shown the slightest interest in what might happen once a baby was born.
There seemed to be no thought for the child with their genes, or any sign of an emotional attachment to any possible child who may be the spitting image of them but whom they will never know.
I read this article and it absolutely enraged me. Dr. Sam Wood of Stemagen Corp. wants to pay women to harvest their eggs. He cries that he can't get them any other way. Forget about the health risks to young women, Dr. Wood wants the eggs to continue to pursue therapeutic cloning. It is all about the money. From CNNMoney.com:
Facing a human egg shortage they say is preventing medical breakthroughs, scientists and biotech entrepreneurs are pushing the country's top funders of stem cell research to rethink rules that prohibit paying women for eggs.
The restrictions are necessary, supporters say, to avoid creating a market for human eggs that encourages women to risk their health for speculative science.
But researchers argue that a shortage of eggs fueled by the payment ban is what's kept them from making the advances that prove their technique's real potential.
"You need to have enough eggs to make this thing work, and when you have enough eggs it does work," said Dr. Sam Wood, chief executive of La Jolla-based Stemagen Corp.
"If these guidelines weren't in place, we'd already have many (stem cell) lines and be much closer to a treatment for devastating illnesses for which these are so well suited," Wood said.
Well, sign me up! If Dr. Wood is so convinced that my eggs can change the world. But wait, let us ask ourselves why Dr. Wood is so adamant that therapeutic cloning is the answer even though there is no data to support his claim. The California agency that doles out the 3 billion dollars in taxpayer money for stem cell research has denied all requests for funding of therapeutic cloning:
Last month, the California agency doled out $23 million in research grants but turned down all applications seeking funding for therapeutic cloning. Stemagen and at least one other biotech startup, Cascade Life Sciences Inc. of San Diego, were among the applicants whose proposals were denied.
A main reason cited for the refusals: no guarantee of enough eggs.
So Dr. Wood can't get taxpayer money without an abundant supply of eggs, but he can't get that without paying young women to put their health, their fertility and possibly their lives at risk. Therapeutic cloning to obtain human stem cells is barely a reality and Dr. Wood wants thousands of women to donate to the cause.
Dare I say it: The unmitigated arrogance of some people! Talk about treating women as objects. I think Dr. Wood may out-objectify the porn industry. I will leave you with Dr. Wood's most illuminating last words:
"Give us the eggs. If we don't succeed, then be critical," said Wood. "You have to give people the tools that are required to determine whether the methodology will work."
Informed consent can only occur through autonomy. A young woman who is a university student in need of financial resources to pay her tuition cannot be free of controlling influences by definition of her social and financial position, therefore, she cannot make the autonomous choice to trade her genes for tuition.
Furthermore, if she chooses to participate in donation of her ova under such conditions, she is not only acting out of a position of compromised autonomy, but because of the lack of autonomy she cannot give informed consent.
Her ability to give informed consent is further undermined because, although competent, she lacks capacity; although she receives disclosure, the prevailing standards of disclosure do not meet her needs; although she understands and comprehends her risks, she cannot accept them; although she volunteers for the procedure, it is not in the absence of constraints.
"Such sales nullify the reproductive paradigm, irretrievably replacing it with a manufacturing paradigm. This represents a change in kind, not just in degree, in the way we view our capacity to generate children and destroys our concept of reproduction as an essentially human activity".
In essence, young women, essentially our daughters, and in some cases our wives, who trade their genes for tuition, effectively, are being exploited.
Did they say "manufacturing" in regard to human procreation? Yes, I believe they did!
To keep the wheels of the cloning and embryonic stem cell research turning, researchers need eggs, lots of human eggs. Many young women do not realize the risks of donating or selling their eggs. These risks include loss of fertility and in rare cases death. This video gives a face to the reality of the demand for human eggs and the dangers to healthy young women.
Please spread the word about egg donation. An advertisement in my area calls egg donation "child's play." It is anything but.
I have heard lots of horror stories about what happens to women who go through egg donation. Here is another. From a second timer:
I started to feel blah on Saturday and then around 2 a.m. on Sunday, the blinding pain hit...I had Adam take me to the ER shortly after he got home from work. I was dehydrated, pale and shaky, so they put me in a room, hooked up an IV with fluids and drugs and helped me to feel better. The following day, I went to the fertility clinic and the one ovary (I think it's the right - I couldn't tell on the screen) was so huge that it was taking up the entire screen. They decided to stop the donation process because they said if I continued, it would only get worse. I ended up taking 3 days off of work as the hormones ebbed away, spending my time either in bed or on the recliner not moving very much....
However, Frankenovery is still there. I went to the clinic yesterday for a check up and by the looks of things, it was still 3-4 times the size of the normal ovary.
Make no mistake. This is a serious process that can have devastating consequences. Young women are at huge risk of being exploited by researchers who are desperate for human eggs to conduct their therapeutic cloning experiments.
San Ramon, CA (PRWEB) September 30, 2006 -- Concern over health risks to women providing eggs for cloning research -- including the possibility of ovarian cancer -- is so high that a growing global grassroots effort is taking shape seeking to empower women around the world to organize and speak out.
HandsOff Chair, Diane Beeson, just back from a conference in Korea sponsored by WomenLink said, "Women everywhere, from the US to Korea to Australia, are organizing to demand that their health not be sacrificed in the pursuit of scientific stardom, patents, and the quest for new technologies that may or may not turn out to provide treatments for others." Missouri is a focus for this movement since, come November, citizens there will vote on the state’s stem cell research initiative which enables egg harvesting.
In Korea, women have filed damage claims against the government and Seoul medical centers on behalf of victims of egg extraction who were misled into believing the procedures were safe. Women's health advocates and activists from the US, UK and India gathered in Korea to hear graphic evidence of damage suffered by women undergoing egg extraction. Meanwhile, HandsOff is planning demonstrations in Missouri as well as in Australia, where women are fighting to keep that nation’s ban on cloning in place.
What the current debate fails to clarify is that the proposed cloning research requires women’s eggs -- lots of them. Investigators want to remove the nuclei from women’s eggs and replace them with nuclei from cells taken from those with various diseases. Stem cells derived from the resulting clonal embryos may teach researchers something about disease, possibly suggest cures. The promise of cures may never be realized: no one yet has derived stem cells from a human clonal embryo; those derived from animals are causing tumors. Success is a gamble. Sadly, making women sick is almost a guarantee. [my emphasis]
The opposition to cloning makes strange bed fellows. Hands Off Our Ovaries is a mix of pro-choice and pro-life women and men, all concerned for the health of women worldwide. It is an alliance that I think we should all be grateful for.
How I missed this I do not know, possibly PETBS (post-evil-test-brain syndrome). A new coalition of pro-choice and pro-life women are joining forces to prevent the exploitation of women for their parts by the booming biotech industry.
Clearly this is a brand spanking new website, but I have joined and hope that many others who are concerned about the welfare of women will do the same!
Sounds like a personals ad, but alas it is not. It isn't the women that are needed, it is their eggs. From USA Today: (HT: Bioethics.com)
Five years after a trade group tried reining them in, fertility clinics and brokers are bidding up prices for eggs sold by cash-strapped college women with top test scores and picture-perfect looks.
Advertisements in campus newspapers and on websites plead daily. "Egg Donors Needed. $10,000," says one in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley.
Eggs have been traded almost since the fertility industry started 30 years ago. But now, new technologies tied to the Internet have turned the business into a global bazaar of egg merchants, with little regulatory oversight.
So how big is the fertility industry?:
We are selling children," Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar says in a new book, The Baby Business. Spar wants a national debate on bringing order and safety to an industry in which spending on everything from fertility drugs to eggs has mushroomed to an estimated $3 billion a year.
So why is egg donation a problem?:
Republican Rep. Bob Stump, who wrote the bills, says he worries the industry is taking advantage of vulnerable young women burdened by student loans...
...ASRM acknowledges potential risks, including nausea and diarrhea, from a condition known as "ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome." More severe cases can result in shortness of breath and abdominal bloating. At the most serious, the group says, there is a "remote" risk of death. Donating may also create future fertility trouble for donors. And there is the possibility of emotional problems after donors relinquish parental rights to children conceived with their eggs.
And it is only going to get worse:
The pressure on college students — the most coveted donors — is likely to grow. A sharp increase in embryonic stem-cell research programs across the USA in the past year created a new market for more donors as scientists use eggs to find medical cures.
I have an thought. Maybe if we weren't aborting 1 million babies per year, couples could adopt instead of going through IVF. Then there wouldn't be such a need for young women to put their fertility and health at risk for their eggs. Stop creating and destroying embryos for research and there, problem solved!
So why am I going on about the egg? It isn't just because of the science surrounding the egg. I think it is a symbol of much more.
I have been avoiding this entry because it will be difficult. The Good Lord knows that I am no theologian, and I have prayed for Him to help me out with this part. Forgive me if I fall short, which I am sure I will. Here goes...
Clearly, the egg is very powerful. We women should be proud of what we hold in our bodies and men should respect it. But, more and more the egg is in demand and the demand cannot be filled. More and more women's fertility will be put at risk to get to those eggs. More and more scientists will turn a blind eye to the abuses of women as long as they get their "golden eggs." With egg demand on the rise, and if SCNT in humans is successful, I believe women will become even more marginalized, and more like commodities, not less.
Which brings me to the Church. Critics of the Catholic Church have said that it marginalizes women and does not respect the "sacred feminine." (Sorry, couldn't resist the chance to slam Dan Brown.) In my experience, they could not be more wrong.
The Church has great respect for women evidenced by (but not limited to) its reverence for the procreative power that women hold. The Church says that it is not O.K. to only "acknowledge" some parts of the female reproductive system and leave others. It is not O.K. to ask women to distort or change their fertility so that men can have what they want without consequence. It is not O.K. to make women, or their wombs, or their eggs commodities to be bought and sold.
In short, I believe that because of the respect the Church grants to women, and to sex in general, the Church acknowledges the power of the egg. It is not O.K. to put a women's fertility or life at risk to obtain the incredible egg for research or therapeutic purposes.
This is where the Church and feminists everywhere have common ground. Crazy huh?
I am just waiting for science to stand up and say, "Can we do this without the egg? Can we make pluripotent stem cells without making women commodities? We should try!"
Every cell in your body has the DNA that makes you uniquely you. Every gene that is need for every cell is in all of them, regardless of the kind of cell. So what makes heart cells differ from neurons? Not all cells express the same genes. So, while a heart cell has the genes to make it function like a neuron, it expresses the genes that make it a heart cell.
Which brings us to some stem cell terminology. Each stem cell has different genes expressed that make them fall in one of these categories:
Totipotent stem cells can become all cell types in the body, plus other tissue like placenta cells.
Pluripotent stem cells can become most or all of the over 200 cell types in the human body. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent.
Multipotent stem cells can become multiple cell types. Most adult stem cells are multipotent.
Unipotent stem cells can only become one cell type.
So, in theory, any cell could become a pluripotent stem cell, if we could figure out which genes need to be expressed.
So what does this have to do with an egg? Well, the egg has the magic formula.
In SCNT, the egg takes DNA from a fully differentiated skin cell and turns on and off the right genes to make it pluripotent again. Actually, in SCNT the egg makes a totipotent cell (able to make all cell types including a placenta) which means it makes a zygote, a one-celled embryo. After a weeks growth, the zygote becomes a blastocyst with about 200 cells. The inner cells mass is then pluripotent and researchers break open the embryo to get to the pluripotent cells inside.
So, as of now, the only way to reprogram one of your unipotent cells back to pluripotency, whether through SCNT or ANT, is to use an egg. Unfortunately, in doing so, SCNT creates a cloned human embryo in the process.
Women, you feeling at all special yet?
More on the ethical and theological implications of the incredible egg later...
Many of you may not realize the power of the human oocyte, better known as the egg. There is a reason eggs are in high demand. Like the women who carry them, they hold great power.
So what is it about the egg that makes researchers clamour for them? I first learned about the egg from Dr. Michael West's book The Immortal Cell. (Once again, I highly recommend this book even though it is pro-cloning. West's reasoning is as fascinating as it is scary.)
Very simply, as DNA ages the ends of the chromosomes called telomeres also "age". The telomere has a set number of DNA sequence base repeats. With each cell division the telomere gets shorter, until the lack of repeat sequence signals the cell that it is done dividing. The egg has a unique little enzyme called a telomerase, that resets the telomeres. It puts back the repeats. So inserting 46 year-old DNA into an egg that has had its nucleus removed, makes the 46 year-old DNA "new" again.
West is obsessed with the egg. West explains that he sees eggs very differently than most of us. He writes that most people think:
...the egg is a chicken's way to making another chicken. I say that the chicken is the egg's way of making another egg.
Confused? Let me put it in terms that maybe be easier to understand. Let's take the analogy to humans. We see the human egg as a human's way to make another human. West sees a human being as an egg's way of making another egg. (You may need to read that a few times before the implications settle in.)
No wonder that many, including myself, are concerned about women being exploited for their eggs, if a cloning scientist admits he thinks a woman is an egg's way of making more eggs.
Peter Aldhous wrote a great piece for New Scientist on the selective outrage over the Dr. Hwang cloning scandal. Unfortunately, the commentary is by subscription only, but I will relate the pertinent points. Aldhous writes about when the scandal over Hwang's unethical procurement of eggs broke:
At that time, I contacted several stem cell biologists who were considering collaborating with Hwang. None condoned the ethical lapses, but they did not rule out working with his team in future if they could be satisfied that acceptable standards would be met. It was a different story a few weeks later, however, when news of the scientific fraud emerged. Today no reputable scientist would consider collaborating with Hwang. Data fabrication, it seems, is considered a worse crime than lax bioethics.
The lack of concern over the exploitation of women continues, Aldous writes:
So has the scientific establishment now united in unambiguously condemning Hwang's ethical lapses? Apparently not. On 20 January, Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, spoke on the Hwang affair at a stem-cell ethics meeting at Stanford University in California. He focused on the data fabrication, so I asked about the allegation of egg donations by junior researchers. "I would not have been bothered by that," Kennedy told the packed lecture hall.
Normally, I am not one for male-bashing or playing the "gender-card". On the whole, I think men are great. Here comes the but...
But, I find that many men really don't understand that donating eggs is not like donating sperm. One is invasive and potentially painful with serious side effects and the other is well...not. Add in the fact that while men have an endless supply of gametes, we women have a limited number, and you have the reality that donating eggs is a serious endeavor.
Unfortunately, it isn't just the pro-cloning side that ignores the egg issue. I understand that proponents of altered nuclear transfer (ANT) are well intentioned, but in their zeal for an alternative to cloning to create custom embryonic stem cells, they often fail to mention that ANT still needs eggs like somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) or "garden-variety" cloning. Read this commentary by Dolores Meehan from www.MaryMeetsDolly.com.
Which brings me to my question: is science still a "good ol' boys" network? If other researchers were more concerned about the veracity of Hwang's results than the well-being of fellow women scientists in his lab, then the answer maybe "Yes."
Aldhous finishes his article with this:
Scientists like to talk about the sanctity of data, but human rights and welfare should be every bit as sacred. In publishing false data, Hwang betrayed the trust placed in him by his peers. But his cavalier disregard for the women he exploited, and for the patients whose hopes have been dashed, was far worse.
I found another article on the scandal facing Dr. Hwang and his South Korean cloning research. I thought this one was interesting because it adds a new wrinkle. Hwang claimed that he developed a technique that does not need as many human eggs to produce clones as other labs. Less eggs makes therapeutic cloning more marketable to those who only care about the exploitation of women for their eggs and not about the creation and destruction of innocent human life. (Of course, we know better!) It turns out that not only did Hwang lie about the source of his eggs, but the amount that it took to get his supposed results. From the Boston Globe:
Also yesterday, the Associated Press reported that a former collaborator of Hwang's said he provided hundreds more human eggs than Hwang claimed to have used to clone stem cells for a 2005 paper, also published in Science. In that paper, which built on the 2004 paper, Hwang said that he had dramatically improved the efficiency of his cloning technique, so that he was able to produce cloned embryonic stem cells using far fewer eggs than before. But Roh Sung Il, chairman of the board at Seoul's Mizmedi Hospital, said the hospital provided over 900 eggs from 65 people for the research -- far more than the 185 eggs Hwang claimed to use for the paper.
I also noticed the comment from Dr. Robert Lanza, which means Advanced Cell Technologies is still in the fight. This scandal will not deter their efforts to clone humans. I am sure it has re-energized them and they are working even harder to be the "first" to clone a human and harvest embryonic stem cells.
