Remember when they said “only” excess embryos would be used in research? It was always bunk, and now an article in the New England Journal of Medicine has called for allowing embryos to be made to order and sold like a corn crop.

What would justify this form of nascent human trafficking? From, “Made to Order Embryos for Sale — A Brave New World?”, by I. Glenn Cohen, J.D., and Eli Y. Adashi, M.D:

It is not clear how the sale of made-to-order embryos differs from the sale of oocytes for the manufacture of embryos by somatic-cell nuclear transfer for stem-cell derivation, as is presently sanctioned by New York State. Indeed, one might think that this practice — creating embryos for the purpose of destroying them to derive stem cells — is more ethically challenging than the notion of creating embryos for the purpose of alleviating infertility.

Well, for one thing, an embryo is an organism, a nascent human being. A gamete (sperm or egg) is just a cell.

And note how the game is played: NY unethically permits egg buying for use in biotechnology — and that wrong then becomes the justification for the further objectification of human life and the manufacture and selling of embryos. Talk about rank bootstrapping!

The proper answer is to repeal the NY law, not create an embryo commodities market. Such sophistry has always been the anything goes in biotech crowd’s primary tool.

Here’s the the conclusion:

It is readily apparent why the prospect of made-to-order embryos for sale may give rise to apprehension. However, viewed through a legal and ethical lens, the concerns raised by this potentiality appear to be similar to those associated with widely accepted and more common reproductive technologies, such as the sale of gametes. What is new and unique here is the lack of clear legal guidance as to the parentage of the embryos in question. Joint efforts by state legislatures and professional organizations will be required to forge appropriate legislation if made-to-order embryos for sale are to become a practicable reality.

Make no mistake: This means human cloning is coming closer, as selling embryos for use in IVF is just the front for selling cloned embryos for use in research. I’ll be getting into a more detailed analysis of all this when time allows.

There is a paranoid article in the Topeka Capital Journal asserting that “haters” of IVF may have the practice “in the crosshairs,” not because any legislative proposals have actually been filed or proposed, but because of the new Kansas law that symbolically states that human life begins at fertilization. (Isn’t it funny how the “pro science” side bridles so often at accurate biological science?)

In any event, I hope IVF is “in the crosshairs.” No, I don’t want it “banned,” which the article implies is in the wind, but regulated properly. Beyond statistical issues, IVF is almost wholly unregulated in this country. That needs to change, considering the many important ethical issues at stake, including:

• Informed consent requirements for egg donors, a process that can be dangerous to health and life.
• The practice of buying eggs from women, which ounce-for-ounce, may be the most valuable commodity in the world. If human cloning is ever achieved, tens of thousands of eggs will be needed to perfect the technology, only making matters worse.
• Paid surrogacy, which can exploit poor women;
• The dehumanization of surrogates into “gestational carriers,” and the emotional impact of surrogacy on the women who give birth.
• Biological colonialism, using destitute women in the developing world for procreative purposes.
• Eugenic embryo selection, including for sex selection or to be disabled;
• The potential to make “three parent” babies;
• The potential for genetic engineering of embryos;
• The creation of hundreds of thousands of “extra” embryos that are either frozen, destroyed, or used as a natural resource in research;
• Embryo selling;
• Embryo adoption;
• Whether IVF should be paidby health insurance or government benefits for the infertile;
• Whether gay and lesbian couples should have paid access to IVF even if fecund;
• Using IVF to make “anchor babies” who are U.S. citizens.

Despite these (and other) issues, any attempt to regulate the field is throttled aborning by the rich industry that uses its big financial war chest and the intense emotionalism around childbearing to remain a power unto itself.

Scientists are keeping aborted fetal ovaries alive in order to scavenge their eggs. From the Daily News story:

Scientists are ready to plunder the ovaries of aborted babies for eggs to use in IVF treatment. Experiments have taken the process almost to completion, it emerged yesterday. They raise the nightmare prospect of a child whose biological mother has never been born. The news, from a scientific conference in Madrid, was greeted with widespread revulsion at how far science is testing ethical frontiers. Experts warned of appalling emotional and biological problems.

But fertility doctors say the development could ease a worldwide shortage of donated eggs for women who cannot produce their own . . . Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb. Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks. They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was ‘theoretically possible’ that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.

This isn’t new. I reported on these efforts a few years ago. Some have even called for paying women who want to abort to carry their babies longer so that the cadaver will provide more useful parts.

By the way, it isn’t IVF for which the eggs will be required, but human cloning. Somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning requires a human egg for each try and eggs are in short supply. Indeed, I have frequently noted that the technology has been held back by what I call the “egg dearth.”

But if they can get unlimited eggs from dead fetuses and women, cloning will not only be successfully performed (which, I predicted, will happen this year) but eventually perfected and put to concerted use. Then, it is on to all the Brave New World technologies — such as genetic engineering — that require cloning to develop.

Killing the fetuses and keeping their ovaries alive. That makes the scientists complicit in the abortions. Think about what we are becoming.

Salon.com runs a lengthy, very frank, first-person account of a young woman considering selling her eggs. From “Selling my Eggs to Make Rent”:

Egg donation, as an option, can be seen at once demeaning and empowering: A job that no one else but a woman can have — or rather, a racially pre-selected, usually white, struggling, middle-class, educated woman — can have. For the infertile, the homosexual, the single, and the well-to-do, egg donation is another of the joyous luxuries of modern science. But then there are the women who act as that market’s laborers and nameless vessels; those who are themselves farmed — the anonymous sows, cows, or bitches pumped with hormones and praised for their pedigree and exaggerated numbers of follicles.

It is an interesting and well-written account that seeks to wrestle with multiple aspects of the decision to sell one’s eggs (or not).

You knew it would come to this. To reduce costs, an IVF doctor is making mass quantities of embryos and selling them on the cheap. From the LA Times story:

Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments. He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back.

That’s about half the price for in vitro fertilization at many other clinics, which do not include money-back guarantees. Typically, insurance coverage is limited and patients pay again and again until they give birth — or give up . . . Zeringue sharply cuts costs by creating a single batch of embryos from one egg donor and one sperm donor, then divvying it up among several patients. The clinic, not the customer, controls the embryos, typically making babies for three or four patients while paying just once for the donors and the laboratory work.

The guy’s a veritable Henry Ford.

What a world: Now, it doesn’t even matter who and where the babies come from. The commoditization of human life continues. Regulate?  Not in our entitled age.

By Elizabeth Marquardt and Jennifer Lahl

The New Normal, a sitcom that debuted on NBC this fall, features a gay couple deciding to have a child. They settle upon using an egg donor and a surrogate mother, the latter described cheerfully by a fertility industry representative as “an Easy Bake Oven except with no legal rights to the cupcake.”

It may look cute on television, but what’s the real impact of social acceptance of treating women as “Easy Bake Ovens?” A case right now in Texas highlights the devastating consequences being seen in the U.S. and around the world.

On July 27, Cindy Close gave birth for the first time, to twins, at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women in Houston. The twins were conceived via donor eggs and with sperm from Marvin McMurray, an acquaintance of Close. While Close and McMurray were not in a romantic relationship, her understanding was that they would co-parent the children together. In court documents she says she did not learn until the day the twins were born that McMurray is gay, planned to raise the twins with his partner, and considered Close “just a surrogate.” McMurray rapidly filed a suit to adjudicate parentage outside of the Texas family code. He also filed a temporary restraining order that, Close’s attorney Grady Reiff says, the hospital used to deny her maternal rights and send the babies home with the biological father’s male partner, Phong Nguyen, where they have lived since.

There’s only one major problem here: Close never agreed, verbally or in writing, to be a surrogate mother. Even if she had, such an agreement would not be legal in Texas. In that state, only women who have already given birth can agree to be surrogates, and only married, heterosexual couples can enter such agreements. And in Texas, as in all states, the birth mother is the legal mother, even if donor eggs were used, so long as there is not a valid surrogacy contract.

So, why on earth were these children separated from their loving mother and, in a further bizarre twist, not even sent home with their biological father but rather with his partner? A statement from the Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women says only that “the hospital was directed to follow court orders.” An associate of McMurray’s attorney Ellen Yarrell said that Yarrell is out of the country and this case is “so personal and litigation is ongoing so we’re not going to comment.”

Since the infants’ discharge from the hospital, Close has been allowed just two hours daily supervised visitation. The door must remain open, she cannot bring a friend to help her hold the twins, and she is not allowed to breast feed — she is not even allowed to take their picture. For now, she can only wait until the next court date to hope for being reunited with her children.

No matter your opinion about rights to gay marriage, this case should outrage and chill you, because the violation it represents of women’s bodies is not isolated. Women in India are being used as cheap surrogates for western couples, straight or gay, in some cases housed and monitored in dormitories and delivered by caesarean section for the convenience of the “commissioning” couple. In the U.S., many surrogates are military wives, supplementing their husband’s low pay by renting their wombs, with labor and delivery costs paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. Donated eggs are often involved in these cases. In addition to the identity issues such complex forms of parentage force upon the children, egg donation is a risky business, luring mostly college-aged women into rounds of hormone shots and surgical extractions that are a documented risk to their own health. In this climate, it is disturbing but hardly surprising that at least one man has decided to claim the woman who gave birth to his children was just the hired help.

As mothers ourselves, we reject the exploitation and commodification of women’s bodies happening right now in the U.S. and around the world. Women are not Easy Bake Ovens and our children are not cupcakes. Harris County, Texas, give Cindy Close back her babies.

 
Jennifer Lahl is president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture. Elizabeth Marquardt is editor of FamilyScholars.org.

This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post

Scientists in Oregon have created embryos with the genes of two women and one man. From the AP story:

Scientists in Oregon have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a provocative technique that could someday be used to prevent babies from inheriting certain rare incurable diseases. The researchers at Oregon Health & Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce children, and it is not clear when or even if this technique will be put to use

An argument could be made that “children” were made, depending how one defines the word. Certainly, new human organisms were — and as an experiment. That is a big moral deal.

Researchers want money to go farther with their experiments:

Mitalipov said in an interview that the researchers hope to get federal approval to test the procedure in women, but that current restrictions on using federal money on human embryo research stand in the way of such studies

What, allow the children to be born? Or, repeatedly gestate and abort? That awful prospect would probably be necessary to test safety and examine the development of later embryos and fetuses produced by the procedure before taking it to the final step. Details please.

Federal funding is not allowed because of the Dickey/Wicker Amendment (which also prohibits federal funding of human cloning research). But DW is only a budget issue and must be passed yearly to remain in effect. I think it is urgent that its provisions — which prohibit federal funding for the creation of embryos for use in research — be embedded into permanent federal statutory law. States should also pass such restrictions.

Also note, that preventing illness is just the key that opens the door to many of these Brave New World technologies. Eventually — given the way things go these days — if the procedure ever becomes doable, it will go quickly from the “medical” to the “consumerist,” e.g., facilitating lifestyle choices and personal preferences. That’s what happened with IVF, after all, which is no longer restricted to treating the infertile. Indeed, if we ever normalize polyamory, one could see the technique as a way for three partners to have biologially related children.