John T. Gill, chairman of the Texas Healthcare Task Force, and Texas GOP Rep. Pete Sessions are promoting embryonic stem cell research by telling everyone they can, including members of Congress, that egg harvesting from women is  "a simple, minimally invasive procedure."

One wonders, however, if these southern gentlemen would still believe egg extraction was "minimally invasive" if it was done to men?

Here's what that would require: first male donors would inject themselves with hormones daily to shut down testicular function.  Then they would shift to daily injections of a different hormone that would cause their testicular function to go into warp speed and their testes to swell to abnormal size.

These daily injections would prepare the men to undergo surgical procedures with anesthesia whereby catheters with needles at the end would be inserted into the testes to remove large quantities of sperm. After extraction, about 5 percent of the men would suffer side effects ranging from infection, to future fertility damage, to death.

One could forgive any man reading this far for cringing, but the above description is almost exactly what egg-donation proponents are asking our young women to do in order to get eggs to be cloned for stem cell research, not just to make babies. 

Who is the anonymous female egg donor? She is the woman targeted and courted on virtually every college campus – like Calla Papademas, the 22-year-old Stanford student who suffered a stroke after answering an egg donor ad offering $15,000.

She is the poor woman trying to make ends meet – like Alina Netedu in Bucharest, the 19-year-old factory worker who lost her fertility selling her eggs to pay for her wedding.

She is one of countless others who are being told it is their civic duty to give some eggs for the cause.

What does this simple, minimally invasive procedure entail? Daily injections of powerful hormones, over about a month, to shut down the ovaries and then hyperstimulate them.

Normally women ovulate an egg or two each month. However, if we can trick the ovary and manipulate it, we can get more than a dozen eggs in one cycle. One egg donor commented to me, "My egg broker loved me, as I was easy to stimulate."

Following this hormonal injection regime, the woman's body is ready for the retrieval process. Anesthesia is administered so that a catheter with a needle at the end can be inserted into the vagina. The ovary is punctured, the eggs removed.

Simple and minimally invasive? Risks associated with ovarian stimulation, such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, can cause stroke, organ failure, even death.  Risks increase with anesthesia and needle aspiration of the eggs from the ovaries which can cause internal bleeding.

Sadly, Dr. Gill and Mr. Sessions have not been following the positive trends and changes in fertility medical practice that are minimizing ovarian stimulation for infertile women.  What else could explain why they continue to promote risky stimulation in donors to acquire eggs for unproven research?  With so much at stake, ignorance of the medical facts is no excuse.

Click below to watch Jennifer Lahl’s congressional briefing from the Washington D.C. conference, “Trading on the Female Body,” held March 8 to discuss egg donation risks.

http://cbc-network.org/

Nancy Pelosi believes that embryonic stem cell research (which requires the destruction of human embryos) is a gift from God.

"Science is a gift of God to all of us, and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure," said Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat and speaker of the House. 'And that is the embryonic stem cell research.'"

"People have long warned we were moving toward a 'Brave New World,' " said Robert P. George of Princeton University, who serves on the President's Council on Bioethics. "This is just more evidence that we haven't been able to restrain this move towards treating human life like a commodity. This buying and selling of eggs and sperm and now embryos based on IQ points and PhDs and other traits really moves us in the direction of eugenics."

washingtopost.com

Egg "donation" is risky business

The current soaring demand for human eggs is stirring up controversy about the range of prices women are able to fetch for undergoing medical processes necessary for egg extraction. A recent New York Times article examined the ethical issues that arise when payments increase enough to entice young women to undergo risks they may not fully understand. Part of the problem is incomplete disclosure of known risks but even more concerning is the lack of rigor in researching both short and long term risks and insuring that all women are fully informed before undergoing the process of hyperstimulation of the ovaries prior to extraction.

“There’s no health-outcome data collected by anybody other than some voluntary reporting, and there’s no postmarket testing on how these drugs are being used,” said Susan Berke Fogel, co-founder of the Pro-Choice Alliance for Responsible Research, a project of the Public Health Institute in Oakland, Calif.

In a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, a Harvard Business School professor said the controversy over the price of eggs was obscuring questions of women’s health. The author, Debora L. Spar, an economist who wrote “The Baby Business” last year, calls for more studies of the drugs being used, more long-term follow-up of donors and federal regulations to ensure proper informed consent."

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