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Fetal Tissue

Decent Essays

Should fetal tissue be used to treat disease?

Fetal tissue has been used by scientists since the 1930s to treat disease by helping with vaccine development, stem cell research and to grow tissues to replace those damaged by disease. Generally, scientists receive fetal tissue from abortions, and they grow fetal cells in petri dishes. To create vaccines, they infect fetal cells to generate large amounts of the virus, which they then harvest and purify. Regulations have been in place since the 1990s, restricting fetal tissue research to only be used under certain circumstances. The decision to abort must already be made before doctors can ask about fetal tissue donation, the doctors performing the abortion cannot receive any profit or payment …show more content…

Women may be conceiving and aborting just to donate fetal tissue to grow tissues for a loved one, which is not illegal, only morally wrong. The biggest problem is that there is no real public policy on reproductive rights (mostly just recommendations by doctors, and moral speculation), so there is the possibility of degrading or abusing women as carriers for fetal tissue. In Canada, there is nothing close to a law, only a little policy statement released by the Panel of Research Ethics. There are multiple well documented cases where fetal tissue donation has gone wrong: the Planned Parenthood scandal, and when a Californian women wanted to be artificially inseminated with her father’s sperm, to abort and donate fetal brain tissue to help with her father’s brain cancer. The concept of making use of something that would otherwise be going to waste is appealing, but oftentimes, it is forgotten that fetuses are not just sources of tissue, but potential persons worthy of respect. Respect is lacking in the Planned Parenthood video, which shows a top-level abortion doctor executive talking about the sale and prices of certain body parts casually, even admitting to changing the abortion procedure if fetal tissue donation is taking place. If we, as a society, are to stay away from commercialization of the body, we must maintain a certain level of respect for the lives lost in abortions. Finally, it has also …show more content…

We should not use fetal tissue to treat disease simply because of the huge risk being taken. Abortions are already controversial enough, without adding the possibility of women conceiving and aborting just to donate fetal tissue. With medical science moving on at such a fast pace, fetal tissue research is already being taken over by less controversial methods, such as stem cell research. It is time to let this method go. The only way for fetal tissue research to continue without negative impacts is to have strong public policy, however it is still very hard to regulate and control the many decisions made by doctors and researchers alike. As the Panel of Research Ethics wrote, ethical deliberation and societal values are always evolving, so we need to be careful that they are not evolving into the lack of respect we often see regarding fetuses. As with the ‘baby m’ case and with surrogacy, selling babies, or baby parts (as with fetal tissue research), is potentially degrading to women. With the ‘baby m’ case, the woman had become a commodity, and in fetal tissue research, the fetus becomes the commodity in an illegal reproductive industry. In conclusion, I believe that fetal tissue should not be used to treat disease because of the potential lack of respect towards pregnant women and the aborted fetus, as well as the

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