Stem Cell Research: Issue for Women
As you read this, a woman is pushing the wheelchair of her Parkinson’s-afflicted father, or injecting insulin into her diabetic daughter’s thigh, or bathing her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. Women know that health and disease are their issues, and the freedom to pursue groundbreaking research is a feminist cause.
A year ago, President Bush approved extremely limited federal funding for some of the most promising research in medical history, research that uses stem cells taken from days-old embryos. But opponents of research are still trying to criminalize some of the newest work. And a small number of feminists have joined their efforts, calling for a halt to work known as “research cloning.” They do not speak for most women.
This basic science is not just another way to patch damaged organs. Remove the nucleus from a donated egg and replace it with the nucleus of a body cell from someone with a genetic disease. Shock this egg so that it begins to divide. In a few short days, derive genetically identical stem cells that will grow into small laboratory sample tissue of the diseased organs. Now you can learn how the genetic mutation causes illness and test drugs to cure it.
No other form of stem cell research can be used for this work. That is why mainstream feminist groups, such as the National Women’s Law Center, the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health and the National Partnership for Women and Families, have joined patients, doctors, theologians, ethicists and scientists who are fighting to keep the research legal.
This research will take the donation of women’s eggs. But egg donation will be voluntary and safe, because of strong federal regulations and independent monitoring to minimize injury, coercion of donors or misuse of the research for reproductive or eugenic purposes. Although we can support proposals to expand safeguards, no one should forget that we already have a well-tested system of protections. Halting research while awaiting additional rules would be tantamount to banning the research.
Most feminists are sensitive to those who view this research as vulnerable to the occasional excesses associated with efforts by couples undergoing in vitro fertilization to buy “Ivy League” eggs. But unlike infertility treatments, regulations prevent such practices here.
To stop this research under the guise of “protecting” women is to fall prey to an old trap: seeing women solely as egg-bearers and not as adults who can be trusted to decide to donate eggs to help science.
For some, research cloning is caught up in a deeper debate about human control over nature, as if we could count on nature for moral direction. But nature is not only burbling streams; it also is the cruelty of disease. And “unnatural” things are not all bad or dangerous. Otherwise, we might as well return to the days when we were told to fear contraception and education lest it cause us to become “unnatural” women and leave us barren.
Still others worry that this research advances society inexorably toward the darkest excesses of human eugenics. But research cloning never results in pregnancy or birth; it is purely laboratory work.
The women’s health movement is justifiably proud of its record of calling attention to the dilemmas, excesses and occasional abuses made possible by technological innovation, and of its help in bringing about protections to safeguard this cloning research.
Calls for responsible science and medicine should not be confused with hostility to well-regulated, innovative research and new hope for cures. Feminists can identify their opponents, and they are not the ones in the white coats.
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R. Alta Charo, associate dean for research and faculty development at the University of Wisconsin Law School, was a member of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission and serves on the science advisory board of WiCell Research Institute, a nonprofit supplier of stem cells. Laurie Zoloth, a professor of social ethics at San Francisco State University, has been a consultant for Geron and the International Society for Stem Cell Research. The opinions expressed here are their own.
