DRAWING A LINE IN
STEM CELL RESEARCH 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. 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. 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
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