Aborted Mothers:

RAISING THE DEATH TOLL OF "THERAPEUTIC" CLONING

By Richard M. Doerflinger

Sperm and egg donors. Womb transplants. "Surrogate" mothers. Human cloning.

Science has developed many new ways to reproduce that may blur the meaning of parenthood. But perhaps none is stranger than the idea that, someday, a child may be able to say: "My mother was an aborted fetus."

This bizarre prospect moved closer to reality on June 30, when researchers from Israel and the Netherlands announced "progress" in keeping alive ovarian tissue obtained from second- and third-trimester aborted babies. The ovarian follicles were even stimulated to develop past their primordial state, according to a presentation at a European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Madrid.

No one has yet produced a viable egg from this procedure. But lead researcher Dr. Tai Biron-Shental, from Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, Israel, says this approach may address the "shortage of donated oocytes [eggs]" for efforts to reproduce by in vitro fertilization (IVF).

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority which regulates IVF in the United Kingdom immediately disagreed. "We do not consider the use of tissue from this source to be acceptable for fertility treatment," said a spokesperson, citing "prevailing social attitudes" that would make it "difficult" for a child to come to terms with "being created using aborted foetal material." But in Madrid, Dr. Biron-Shental commented: "I'm fully aware of the controversy about this--but probably, in some place, it will be ethically acceptable" [BBC News Online, 1 July 2003].

Fetal tissue from abortions has dropped from public attention in recent years, because Congress's 1993 decision to fund medical research using this tissue has been such a failure. Fetal pancreatic tissue has turned out to be useless for diabetes, for example. And two major studies found that fetal neural tissue not only failed to benefit most Parkinson's patients, but actually worsened the condition of many patients.

Now fetal ovaries are being touted as a new way to "legitimize" abortion as a source of medical benefits - - with an added insidious angle. A distraught pregnant woman could be told that if she aborts her "unwanted" unborn daughter, the child's eggs may be used to help provide a "new life" that is intensely "wanted" by another woman.

Some adept counseling may be required, of course, to explain how this "blob of tissue" could contain, in primordial form, all the eggs for producing the next generation that this little girl would ever have had. How can the unborn child not be a person, if she can be a mother?

But social revulsion, and the uncertain complications of using eggs matured from an aborted child, may well prevent this from being used as a source of eggs for fertility treatments for some time to come. The more immediate implications are even more macabre - - and they were already on display in 1994, the last time there was a serious debate in the U.S. about using eggs from fetal tissue.

The debate was sparked in January 1994, when a Scottish researcher announced that he had made progress in harvesting fetal ovaries from animals and wanted to try it in humans. "Womb robbing" and "fetus farming" were among the phrases used by ethicists and others who criticized this idea. Even pro-abortion columnist Ellen Goodman wrote a column in the Washington Post, citing a need for "ethical stop signs" against such experiments. Yet by the end of that month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was reviewing a grant proposal for conducting such experiments with federal funds.

This proposal soon came before the NIH's Human Embryo Research Panel, an advisory group that met from February to September of 1994 to discuss federal funding of experiments that destroy human embryos. The panel was handpicked to favor such experiments. In fact, at its first meeting, panel chairman Steven Muller of Johns Hopkins University announced that any member not holding this view should resign, because the panel's task was not to decide whether or not to fund such experiments but to choose which ones to fund first. Yet even this group found the "fetal ovaries" proposal to be one of the most controversial issues it discussed.

Division on the NIH panel was most obvious at its April 1994 meeting. The panel had to decide how to obtain eggs that could be used to create "research embryos" - - human embryos created solely in order to be destroyed in experiments. One panelist, University of Wisconsin law professor Alta Charo, actually suggested that ovaries from aborted fetuses should be the most acceptable source for these eggs - - because the egg "donor" in this case is in no position to withhold consent or to worry about the future fate of her doomed offspring.

But Thomas Murray, ethicist and now president of the Hastings Center, spoke against use of eggs from this source for "moral and prudential" reasons, arguing that such exploitation of the dead unborn "runs afoul of deeply and widely held moral sentiments." He said that if the panel's final report endorsed use of fetal ovaries, that would be the focus of all news headlines - - and "I don't like to lead with my chin."

Ultimately, the NIH panel narrowly decided to put the use of fetal eggs into an intermediate category, that of research "requiring further review" - - almost half the panelists voted to make it ineligible for federal funding altogether. The panel did approve funding for some experiments requiring the creation of "research embryos," but this recommendation was rejected by President Clinton. Its remaining recommendations, on experiments using "spare" embryos from fertility clinics, were later rejected by Congress. And so the issue of exploiting aborted children for their eggs fell into a political vacuum. Until now.

The reason this issue may resurface in the U.S. has little to do with producing babies for women who can't ovulate, and everything to do with the reason the NIH panel discussed the issue in 1994: the need for eggs to make "research embryos." But this time, the context is human cloning.

Some American scientists and biotechnology companies are obsessed with the idea of cloning human embryos for research, claiming that such "therapeutic cloning" can provide stem cells that will not be rejected as foreign tissue by patients in need of cell therapies. Embryos would be created using genetic material from patients' own body cells, without fertilization of eggs by sperm.

But this procedure still requires women's eggs. The high death rate of cloned embryos and the enormous wastefulness of the stem cell harvesting procedure mean that trying to treat even one major disease would require millions and millions of eggs. The question is, where to get them?

Obtaining eggs in these quantities from women would require massive unethical experimentation, because it could impose serious risks on the egg donors without providing them with any medical benefit. A March 27 hearing before a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, for example, was titled "Cloning: A Risk to Women?"

It featured testimony from a fertility expert and a former IVF patient about the dangers of the drugs used in clinics' "superovulation" regimes, in which women's ovaries are stimulated to produce many eggs at once. Given the medical risks, say some feminist critics of human cloning, women would probably have to be paid to undergo this regime and its risks, leading to the exploitation of poor women who are desperate enough to endanger their health for pay.

The prospect of exploiting dead unborn children instead may therefore prove tempting to those who want to pursue human cloning for research purposes. The unborn child cannot object to being exploited, or to having her own offspring killed for research, and is already a "nonperson" under the Supreme Court's abortion doctrine. The only consent needed to dissect her for her ovaries would come from the parents who already decided to have her killed as "unwanted." This makes fetal ovaries into the perfect egg source for the researcher without scruples.

Cloning supporters have long claimed that the procedure's alleged benefits should not be blocked by "abortion politics." But abortion may re-enter this field in a big way. If unjustly killed children are exploited to clone new embryos, who in turn are to be killed for their stem cells, this allegedly "lifesaving" research will become even more closely linked with a culture of death.

Mr. Doerflinger is deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.