Taxpayers in New York may soon be paying women to put their lives at risk.
The ethics committee of New York’s Empire State Stem Cell Board recently recommended that taxpayer money be given to researchers who have paid women for the harvesting of their eggs for research purposes. If the full stem-cell board agrees, New York will become the first state to allow such reimbursement.
But the ethics committee shirked a glaring problem: egg harvesting endangers women’s health. Egg donation requires preliminary hormone treatment, and this hormone therapy is accompanied by serious health risks including an increased risk of ovarian cancer and complications with future pregnancies. Other risks include ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome (OHSS), which can cause loss of fertility, organ failure, and death.
And in the current economic climate, more women will be putting their lives at risk. At a “reimbursement” rate around $10,000, women hard-hit by the economy will be more likely to take risks they would not have otherwise taken. The result is the commoditization of eggs and the exploitation of women.
What’s more is that there is no benefit in sight, and certainly not to the women involved. Quoting Dr. David Prentice, Wesley Smith in Human Dignity in the Biotech Century explains that it is not possible to obtain even enough eggs to treat diabetic patients in the U.S., let alone all of the other patients who have been promised (intangible) benefits from embryonic stem cell research. Dr. Prentice has computed that it would take 800 million eggs just to treat the 16 million Americans suffering from diabetes. Smith concludes, “There simply aren’t enough women of childbearing age to supply all these eggs.”
In other words, the harvesting of eggs will not help produce cures, and women’s lives are placed in danger simply to satisfy scientific curiosity. This can be categorized as nothing other than the exploitation of women.
In 2008, AUL, in conjunction with Dr. Prentice, provided an extensive report to New York’s stem cell board demonstrating that therapies utilizing adult stem cells are already treating patients and that any taxpayer money should be used for treatments that are already proven to be working. The ethics committee ignored these hard facts.
Apparently, scientific whim is more important than the lives of women.
