DRAWING A LINE IN STEM CELL RESEARCH

by Judy Norsigian and Stuart A. Newman

Last month the two of us, a women’s health activist and a pro-choice biologist, testified before a Congressional committee in favor of a bill that would ban the cloning of human embryos and thus curtail certain forms of stem cell research. Why would political progressives and defenders of reproductive autonomy advocate restricting what some have characterized as an area of medicine with great promise, thus finding ourselves on the same side of the issue as anti-choice conservatives? After much difficult consideration we have become convinced that any benefits that may result from the specific type of stem cell research that utilizes “clonal embryos,” that is, genetic duplicates of existing individuals, would be far outweighed by the threats to women’s health and our sense of our humanity posed by creation of such embryos.

Because clonal human embryos could be used for experimental purposes and ultimately as sources of donor-matched embryo stem cells, some researchers and biotechnology companies have been resisting any restrictions on their ability to produce them. Recently, a company in Massachusetts announced that they have already moved forward with producing clonal embryos using methods similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep.

While responsible scientists and physicians are at present unanimous in opposing bringing clonal embryos to term, their primary basis for this opposition are the hazards (currently uncontrollable) that have led to fetal and postnatal deaths, birth defects, and health problems with advancing age, in the vast majority of cloned animals to date. Although these reasons alone are sufficient to halt reproductive cloning experimentation, we believe that social and ethical considerations should still be paramount in creating public policy surrounding clonal technologies, even if research with clonal human embryos and cloned animals bring the technical problems under control.

Supporters of women’s health and reproductive rights have been, until now, relatively silent on the matters of human reproductive cloning (where a clonal human embryo is brought to term) and stem cell research that depends on cloned embryos. Recently, however, a statement calling for an effective ban on human reproductive cloning has been signed by over 100 pro-choice advocates and organizations. Some signatories are concerned primarily with the risks to women's and children’s health and do not want to see women and children subjected to mass experimentation of the sort we are now seeing with cows, sheep, and pigs. (It took close to 300 failed experiments - some of them with grotesque results - to finally produce Dolly the sheep, who is now experiencing health problems such as have plagued virtually every cloned animal). And women whose eggs are harvested for cloning have to be treated with hormones to induce superovulation, possibly putting them at increased risk of ovarian cancer, with no benefit to themselves. Such research is little different from the sort that has been outlawed since the formulation of the Nuremberg Principles following World War II.

Other signatories emphasize that cloning would violate deeply and widely held convictions concerning human individuality and dignity. Any person produced in this fashion would be an experiment—not the normal genetic “roll of the dice” that up to now has led to each of us being a genetically unprecedented individual, but someone designed to possess specific characteristics of a preexisting genetic prototype.
It will be all but impossible to enforce a ban on the creation of fully-formed human clones, if clonal embryo research is allowed to proceed. In the current climate, with several "cowboy" researchers already moving forward with efforts to bring cloned humans to full term, it is critical that public policies actively thwart such efforts, at least until international agreements that would effectively ban the cloning of genetic duplicate humans are firmly in place. Otherwise, some clonal embryos are likely to be implanted in the uteri of women who are willing to be part of such cloning experiments. And what new assaults on a woman’s reproductive rights would follow from her gestating a banned clonal embryo, or wanting to terminate a pregnancy involving some company’s “property”?

Advocates of human reproductive cloning and other forms of inheritable genetic modification have attempted to appropriate the language of reproductive rights to support their case. But there is an immense difference between seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy and seeking to create a genetically duplicated or modified human being. It is an unfortunate consequence of the rise of the new genetic technologies that “reproductive choice” is increasingly taken to include the right to manipulate the genetic composition of the next generation.

A ban on creating clonal embryos would not foreclose the use of human embryos resulting from IVF procedures for valid medical research, including their use to generate embryonic stem cells. Assertions that clonal embryos will be essential in the development of currently-sought medical therapies are premature, and alternative avenues of stem cell research and other approaches to dealing with immune system rejection might well achieve these therapeutic goals without ever utilizing stem cells from clonal embryos.
As the new genetic and reproductive technologies proliferate, the question continually arises as to “where to draw the line.” Because embryo cloning will compromise women’s health, turn their eggs and wombs into commodities, compromise their reproductive autonomy and, with virtual certainty, lead to the production of “experimental” human beings, we are convinced that the line must be drawn here.

Judy Norsigian is co-founder of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and co-author of "Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century" (Simon and Schuster, Touchstone, 1998). Stuart A. Newman is a professor of cell biology and anatomy, New York Medical College, Valhalla.

Printed in the Boston Globe, August 3, 2001

(c) 2001 Boston Globe