Risking Women’s Health, While Widening the Door to Techno-Eugenics
By Tina Stevens and Stuart Newman,
CounterPunch
| 09. 26. 2019
In September, California’s legislature passed AB 922, a bill legalizing the payment to women for their eggs for research purposes. Additionally, next year, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is expected to return to the voters to secure passage of an initiative that will supply billions of dollars to fund entrepreneurial bioresearch. If Governor Newsom does not veto AB 922, CIRM will have a green light to fund research that will not only jeopardize women’s health through egg extraction but will enable the controversial genetic manipulation of human embryos. (Already, there are bioentrepreneurs who have created genetically engineered human embryos for implantation.)
This human genetic engineering would be massively amplified by vastly expanding the market in women’s eggs, the raw material necessary for the industrialization of human production. (see Stuart A. Newman: “Our Assembly-Line Future? CounterPunch, July 28, 2018). AB 922 and the expected repeat funding of CIRM constitute the leading edge of a juggernaut roaring down the road to techno-eugenics.
When instituted in 2004, CIRM was specifically prohibited from funding research that paid women for eggs. Only...
Related Articles
By Jenny Lange, BioNews | 12.01.2025
A UK toddler with a rare genetic condition was the first person to receive a new gene therapy that appears to halt disease progression.
Oliver, now three years old, has Hunter syndrome, an inherited genetic disorder that leads to physical...
By Rachel Hall, The Guardian | 11.20.2025
Couples are needlessly going through IVF because male infertility is under-researched, with the NHS too often failing to diagnose treatable causes, leading experts have said.
Poor understanding among GPs and a lack of specialists and NHS testing means male infertility...
By Pam Belluck and Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 11.19.2025
Gene-editing therapies offer great hope for treating rare diseases, but they face big hurdles: the tremendous time and resources involved in devising a treatment that might only apply to a small number of patients.
A study published on Wednesday...
By Aisha Down, The Guardian | 11.10.2025
It has been an excellent year for neurotech, if you ignore the people funding it. In August, a tiny brain implant successfully decoded the inner speech of paralysis patients. In October, an eye implant restored sight to patients who had...
