CGS-authored
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Of all the questions about California's ambitious plans to publicly finance human cloning projects for medical research, one of the thorniest may be how scientists plan to gather the thousands of eggs they'll need from women.
It's an ethical dilemma that has made unlikely allies of Christian groups _ who believe cloning immorally creates and destroys life in the name of science _ and women's rights activists who fear that poor women will be exploited by commercial interests willing to pay thousands of dollars for human eggs produced by fertility drugs.
The issue is not abstract. A small, nonprofit lab outside Boston has been quietly paying a handful of women for the last four years to take hormone injections to "superovulate" several eggs at once and donate them for research.
The Bedford Stem Cell Research Foundation has paid about 20 women about $4,000 each plus expenses to take fertility hormones. It is the only U.S. organization known to be actively collecting eggs for research purposes.
Bedford has had to suspend its egg collection program four times since...
It's an ethical dilemma that has made unlikely allies of Christian groups _ who believe cloning immorally creates and destroys life in the name of science _ and women's rights activists who fear that poor women will be exploited by commercial interests willing to pay thousands of dollars for human eggs produced by fertility drugs.
The issue is not abstract. A small, nonprofit lab outside Boston has been quietly paying a handful of women for the last four years to take hormone injections to "superovulate" several eggs at once and donate them for research.
The Bedford Stem Cell Research Foundation has paid about 20 women about $4,000 each plus expenses to take fertility hormones. It is the only U.S. organization known to be actively collecting eggs for research purposes.
Bedford has had to suspend its egg collection program four times since...
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