April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
EDITORIAL

Life not for purchase or cloning

In some spots of the globe, desperate people sell their kidney or other organ to richer people in need of one. In many of our own neighborhoods, people have had to sell their blood to buy food or pay rent. One day, needy women in New York may be able to sell their eggs for taxpayer-reimbursed fees so that these can be used to create em-bryonic clones that are then killed as stem cells are extracted for research purpose.

The glories of the free market, courtesy of the Empire State Stem Cell Board.

Thankfully, an appeal has been filed to prevent this after the original suit was denied. It is one of a pair of legal actions in Albany and Washington, DC - where a judge has blocked publicly-funded embryonic stem cell research - that promise to resurrect barriers around the sanctity of life.

Last June, the Empire State Stem Cell Board approved the use of public monies to pay women who donate eggs up to $10,000 for their time, expenses, travel and, most importantly, pain and discomfort.

This last provision sets us apart from other states with such programs, which pay only for actual expenses. We would be, in essence, buying eggs from women who go through the arduous process.

Most likely, those who participate would be poor and need the money to get by. (Private fertility clinics pay much more, but routinely want only tall, blond, Ivy League graduates.)

The board's appointed members operate through the state Department of Health, which began drafting implementation guidelines. But last December, Feminists Choosing Life of New York filed suit to block it.

They argued first that likely donors could not grant informed consent to the procedure, since they would be under financial duress and unable to realize the danger or pain involved. "They would assume all of the risks and none of the benefits," said Jean Baric of FCLNY, based in Rochester.

Second, FCLNY said the program would violate the state's ban on any research that would advance, directly or indirectly, human cloning. In the proposed procedure, scientists would take the donated egg, suck out its DNA and insert DNA from another person. This would "trick" the egg to begin growing into an embryo that is, essentially, a clone of the DNA donor. Rather than coming to maturity, however, its stem cells would be removed and the embryo destroyed in the process.

The suit was denied; FCLNY now plans to appeal. They deserve success in blocking the public purchase of eggs from desperate, exploited women and the back-door promulgation of human cloning. All people - religious or not, pro-life or not - should recoil from either.

Meanwhile, in Washington last month, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lambert ruled that all human embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of a human embryo and thus cannot be federally funded under the 1995 Dickey-Wicker Amendment.

"The language of the statute reflects the unambiguous intent of Congress to enact a broad prohibition of funding research in which a human embryo is destroyed," Lambert declared.

The decision overturns guidelines from the Obama administration to fund and expand such work. It disappoints our secular-scientific-medical complex, which pants after the long-promised benefits of embryonic stem cell research.

Such benefits should never derive from the destruction of human life.

(09/09/10) [[In-content Ad]]

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