Posted on 05/11/2007 3:23:52 AM PDT by don-o
Opposition to the abuse of women in the acquisition of human ova for research has brought together an unlikely coalition: pro-life and pro-choice activists.
According to pro-family Cara Cook, conservative Christian activists like herself have been willing to work together with feminist women's health advocates on the single issue of opposing egg-harvesting because of health risks to women.
"In the last year alone, two women who have undergone egg extraction in the United Kingdom have died after developing severe ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), which causes rapid accumulation of fluid in the abdomen, chest, and around the heart. Symptoms include severe pelvic pain, nausea, vomiting, weight gain, ovarian enlargement, respiratory problems, blood clots and liver dysfunction," says Cook, who is operations assistant for Concerned Women for America and a graduate of Notre Dame University.
Opponents argue that if egg harvesting becomes widely used for the purposes of stem- cell research and therapeutic cloning, the number of cases of severe OHSS will rise considerably. Dr. David Prentice of the Family Research Council points out that of the 80 million women who would be required for egg harvesting to treat diabetes alone, as many as 800,000 would experience OHSS.
According to Dr. Diane Beeson of California State University, the global opposition to human egg-harvesting was accelerated by last year's revelations that Korea's Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk had coerced subordinates and exploited paid "donors" for more than 2,000 human eggs which were harvested, used, and destroyed in his unsuccessful cloning research efforts.
Dr. Beeson, a scholar affiliated with the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future is one of the organizers of the international campaign "Hands Off Our Ovaries."
Although some feminist groups simply want better regulation of the acquisition of human "experimental materials," Hands Off has taken the more comprehensive approach of opposing all egg harvesting for the purpose of human cloning research. Hands Off 's predecessor, the Pro-Choice Coalition Against Proposition 71, highlighted the grave women's health hazards posed by human embryonic stem cell experimentation in California in 2004; and Hands Off joined forces with conservative Christian groups against Amendment Two, Missouri's 2006 human cloning measure.
Dr. Beeson said that, although having pro-life and pro-choice women working together on this issue is sensitive and difficult, it also opens up new perspectives.
Josephine Quintavalle, a Catholic member of the Hands Off advisory board working in the UK and Europe, has encouraged a similar coalition of pro-choice/pro-life activists in Rome.
"They are doing very interesting work, far wider in scope in fact than the Hands Off coalition itself,” she said. “They are sharing information and exploring the anti-woman dangers of a whole spectrum of new reproductive technologies."
"Women's health advocates must align with people across the political spectrum, regardless of where they stand on abortion per se, on the issue of protecting women from these dangerous and dehumanizing technologies," says Dr. Beeson, who is a supporter of legal abortion. "I am not willing to give up and let women, especially poor women, be turned into suppliers of human 'raw material' for the biotech industry."
Ping to Mrs Don-o article. Freepmail me to be added or removed.
Don't kill your baby.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I’m pretty sure I’ve NEVER touched anyone’s ovaries....nor would I WANT to....!!!
This article smells. Two women in the UK die and we now have a world movement for what? I’m certain I don’t know what the basis for the article is in the first place. A million prebirth babies die every year in the US and there isn’t a peep.
Egg harvesting will become a necessity for large scale stem cell production and cloning. As for “not a peep” have you read this board lately? Giuliani’s flip flopping on the abortion issue is getting quite a number of “peeps”.
Did I miss something here?
Is someone holding these women down and forcing them to give up their eggs?
This sounds like hyperbolic bull excrement to me.
I’d just like to go on record here as saying I’ve never handled a woman’s ovaries.
I was wondering when the feminists were going to figure this out. They must be torn between the big money givers who would kill to get what they want(a child of their own at the time they might want one) and a shred of morals which might be hiding deep within them somewhere.
I’m afraid (not really) the Guiliani flip flop issue is a is a dead horse. The Guiliani haters need something to bash with. I’m so sick of mudslinging campaigns. I don’t want to hear anything negative about anyone. There is sufficient on the positive side alone to enable anyone with half a brain, to determine who and what the many candidates are without true or false accusations and mud slinging.
*************
A hideous, evil disregard for human life.
People opposed to it say they are taking advantage of ‘poor’ college kids who don’t know the risks. I say, let them do their own damn research.
Yeah, I’d say Lupus is a complication. Egg harvesting will also leave millions of women sterile if they get into the super-ovulation regimens required.
It is not considered ethical (and I am talking accepted Western medical and scientific ethics, not morality) to have someone undergo a potentially dangerous medical procedure, for pay or for free, when there is no direct therapeutic benefit.
When an infertile woman undergoes ovarian stimulation for the purpose of having a child, that is a direct therapeutic benefit. When a woman does it for pay so eggs can be harvested for stem cell research, that is not a direct therapeutic benefit.
Egg collection seems to be the exception to this ethical rule.
Mrs VS
Look for a revival of the early 90s proposal to use the ova of aborted girl babies. The way these scientist want to run through ova, the paid donor supply won’t keep up.
Mrs VS
Now doing this to retrieve eggs for the sole purpose of research is an entirely different story.
"Biotech companies advertise all the time here on campus. They print stuff like “Earn $5000 Easy and Fast”. In reality, the procedures are very taxing with a significant risk of complications."
"Egg harvesting will also leave millions of women sterile if they get into the super-ovulation regimens required."
Right now they're paying the premium "top dollar" women (University student, blonde, long legs, blue-eyed and all that) $5,000 for ova to use for baby manufacturing for rich people who want smart blonde IVF babies. That's bad enough, since, inter alia, submitting to a bizarro-world hormonal regimen and surgery misrepresented to you as "safe," and ending up reproductively maimed, sterile, and/or dead is what we could call a suboptimal outcome, OK?
But the clone-research deal turns out to be much, much worse than even IVF-by-donor, because they're not going to pay anywhere near $5,000 per donor/vendor, and it won't matter whether the donor/vendor is an English Major at UCLA or a low-income, non-computer-literate young gal in Bakersfield or, better yet, Brazil.
Because for cloning research, they'll pay chump change per ovulatory cycle, and t'hell with whether the human subject was desperate, coerced, or unable to grasp the fine print or "do her own research" on the Internet. This is a brutal commodification of the bodies of women and girls.
(And you don't think there are plenty of men in societies where women are already regarded as chattel, who would sell their wives and daughters into this scheme?)
White Ova and Embryos, Great for Babies!
Brown Ova and Embryos (by the millions) Perfect for Experimentation!!
And I won't even talk about the prospect of what the very insightful Mrs. Veritatis Splendor said here.
Thank God for the feminists who can see what's coming down the road. The further they get into opposing this, the more they'll see the whole picture, babies and all.
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