Scientists Want to Scavenge Aborted Fetal Eggs for IVF Treatment

Bioethics   |   Wesley J. Smith   |   Apr 2, 2013   |   12:39PM   |   London, England

Scientists are keeping aborted fetal ovaries alive in order to scavenge their eggs.

From the Daily News story:

Scientists are ready to plunder the ovaries of aborted babies for eggs to use in IVF treatment. Experiments have taken the process almost to completion, it emerged yesterday. They raise the nightmare prospect of a child whose biological mother has never been born. The news, from a scientific conference in Madrid, was greeted with widespread revulsion at how far science is testing ethical frontiers. Experts warned of appalling emotional and biological problems.

But fertility doctors say the development could ease a worldwide shortage of donated eggs for women who cannot produce their own…Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb. Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks. They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was ‘theoretically possible’ that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.

This isn’t new. I reported on these efforts a few years ago. Some have even called for paying women who want to abort to carry their babies longer so that the cadaver will provide more useful parts.

By the way, it isn’t IVF for which the eggs will be required, but human cloning. Somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning requires a human egg for each try and eggs are in short supply. Indeed, I have frequently noted that the technology has been held back by what I call the “egg dearth.”

But if they can get unlimited eggs from dead fetuses and women, cloning will not only be successfully performed (which, I predicted, will happen this year) but eventually perfected and put to concerted use. Then, it is on to all the Brave New World technologies–such as genetic engineering–that require cloning to develop.

Killing the fetuses and keeping their ovaries alive. That makes the scientists complicit in the abortions. Think about what we are becoming.

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LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Secondhand Smoke.