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May, 2007, 2:5
CONTENTS:
MEDIA: Video Encore: Trading on the Female Body If you cannot see the video, view online or download to view (Quicktime file), SPECIAL REQUEST: Our video, “Trading on the Female Body,” is receiving wide and positive response. Its first three weeks saw well over 1400 viewings. The video could be a powerful way to grow the numbers of people calling for a moratorium on egg harvesting for research – if you help. All you need do is copy and paste the following text into an email and send it off to people in your address book. PLEASE HELP! Send an email (if link above fails please copy and paste the following text into the body of your email) Dear Friend,
OPINION: Viewpoints, Dallas Morning News Minimally invasive? More like reckless endangerment Someone teach these men about the dangers of egg harvesting, says JENNIFER LAHL, 12:00 AM CDT on Monday, May 14, 2007John T. Gill, chairman of the Texas Healthcare Task Force, and Texas GOP Rep. Pete Sessions – to promote embryonic stem cell research – are telling everyone they can, including members of Congress, that egg harvesting from women is a "a simple, minimally invasive procedure." One wonders, however, if these Southern gentlemen would still believe egg extraction was "minimally invasive" if it were done to men? Here's what that would require: Donors would inject themselves daily with a hormone to first, shut down their testicular function. Then we'd shift to daily injections of another 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 a surgical procedure with anesthesia whereby a catheter with a needle 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, damage to their future fertility and, in a few cases, even death. One could forgive any men reading this far if they abruptly turned the page, but the above description is almost exactly what we are asking our young women to do as the debate shifts from eggs for babies to eggs for embryos that will be cloned for stem cell research. 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 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 – which can cause stroke, organ failure, even death. Risks associated with anesthesia. Risks associated with the needle aspiration of the eggs from the ovaries which can cause internal hemorrhage. Sadly, Dr. Gill and Mr. Sessions have not been following the positive trends and changes in fertility medical practice. Times are changing as fertility medicine moves to the more natural, minimal ovarian stimulation, women-friendly model of "less is better" for infertile women. With so much at stake, ignorance of the medical facts is no excuse. Jennifer Lahl Link: DallasNews.com, TOP NEWS: The HandsOff Newsletter features articles concerning policies, controversies, and ethics relevant to egg harvesting for cloning research; this may include articles reporting medical information learned from the IVF industry. Similarly, articles concerning global egg trafficking in the IVF industry are relevant and may be included since the increased demand for eggs for research will likely build on these already ongoing global arrangements. Additionally, as a service, the Newsletter may include articles concerning biotech patenting, animal-human hybrid creation (chimerism), stem cell research and reproductive cloning in so far as they may be relevant to considerations of research cloning. As Demand for Donor Eggs Soars, High Prices Stir Ethical Concerns: By RONI CARYN RABIN, Published: May 15, 2007 Ethicists and some women’s health advocates worry that lucrative payments are enticing young women with credit-card debt and steep tuition bills to sell eggs without seriously evaluating the risks. For full story visit: nytimes.com, TOP Perspectives on compensated egg-sharing in the People's Republic of China: Volume 14, No 5 May 2007, In the People’s Republic of China, the only means of procuring donor oocytes is through compensated egg-sharing with patients undergoing IVF or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), since the solicitation of oocyte donation from non-patients is explicitly forbidden by law. Like many developed countries, there is a growing incidence of age-related female infertility in the large urban population, as more highly educated career women choose to delay marriage and childbearing. This, in turn, has fuelled escalating demand for egg-sharing in fertility treatment, which is further exacerbated by the ever-widening income gap between urban professionals and unskilled manual workers,as well as by the increasingly unequal wealth distribution between rural and urban populations. Very often, participation in egg-sharing represents the only means for poorer rural couples to access highly expensive fertility treatment in the present day. As a result, childless women from the lower income group are often under coercive pressure to participate in egg-sharing to enable their access to highly expensive fertility treatment. The situation is made worse by the strongly patriarchal element in traditional Chinese culture, which results in married women shouldering most of the blame for childlessness, even if the underlying cause is male-factor infertility. Based on current socio-demographic trends and market economics, it is envisioned that compensated egg-sharing will play an increasingly prominent role in the clinical assisted reproduction scene within the People’s Republic of China. B C Heng1,3, X Zhang2,4 1 National University of Singapore, 5 Lower Kent Ridge Road, 119074 Singapore 2Reproduction and Genetic Center, First Hospital of Peking University, Peking University, No 8, Xishiku St, West District, Beijing 100034, People's Republic of China 3Correspondence: Tel: +65 6516 4710; Fax: +65 6774 5701; e-mail: denhenga@nus.edu.sg 4Pedieos IVF Center, 8 Karaoli Street & Byron Avenue Corner, Anemomylos Building, Office No 201, 1095 Nicosia, Cyprus Reproductive BioMedicine Online 2007 rbmonline.com [e-pub ahead of print on 21 March 2007] ; Reproductive BioMedicine Online 2007 Vol. 14 No.5. 664–665 TOP Study Debunks Theory That Fertility Can Be Restored: Medical News Today News Article 05/14/2007, 13 May, 2007 It is highly unlikely that older women generate new eggs, report researchers at the University of South Florida in collaboration with a center in China. The USF study, published in the journal Developmental Biology and highlighted in Nature, counters the controversial findings of reproductive endocrinologist Jonathan Tilly, PhD, and his team of Harvard scientists. Tilly's work, published in 2004 in Nature with a follow-up study a year later in Cell, challenged the biological dogma that mammals, including women, are born with a limited lifetime supply of eggs. Tilly reported the discovery of stem cells capable of migrating from bone marrow to mouse ovaries and generating new eggs there. The research fueled hopes that a new treatment - such as bone marrow transplantation - might one day help older women regain their fertility. Since then, other papers have refuted Tilly's surprising finding that mice can produce eggs throughout their lives. Now, David Keefe, MD, professor and chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at USF, and colleague Lin Liu, who also holds a post at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, say they can find no evidence to support his hypothesis that women may generate neweggs after birth. The USF researchers searched for markers of stem cells or of meiotic cell division in ovarian cells biopsied from 12 women between the ages of 28 and 53. "Despite using the most sensitive methods available, we found no evidence of any egg stem cells in human ovaries, demonstrating that Dr. Tilly's findings in mice do not apply to women," Dr. Keefe said. "Dr. Tilly likely was seeing non-egg cells which resemble eggs. Another reason his findings do not apply to women could be because mice eggs are more resilient than women's eggs. The bottom line is that women should not expect stem cell therapy to treat egg infertility or menopause in the foreseeable future." The traditional view of fertility holds that women are born with all their eggs and they are released one by one (occasionally two) at each ovulation. At menopause, few to no mature eggs are believed to remain in the ovaries. Contact: Anne DeLotto Baier University of South Florida Health Article URL: medicalnewstoday.com, TOP Government Urged Not to Ban Embryo Work: LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists and lawmakers urged the government on Thursday to scrap a proposed ban on creating hybrid animal-human embryos for research into illnesses such as Parkinson's, stroke and Alzheimer's. Link: scotsman.com, TOP
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