harvest the eggs of aborted baby girls
Should we take eggs from aborted babies?
by BEEZY MARSH and JAMES CHAPMAN, Daily MailScientists are ready to plunder the ovaries of aborted babies for eggs to use in IVF treatment. Experiments have taken the process almost to completion, it emerged yesterday.
They raise the nightmare prospect of a child whose biological mother has never been born. The news, from a scientific conference in Madrid, was greeted with widespread revulsion at how far science is testing ethical frontiers.
Experts warned of appalling emotional and biological problems.
But fertility doctors say the development could ease a worldwide shortage of donated eggs for women who cannot produce their own.
Only last week a British clinic offered cut-price IVF treatment to women who agreed to donate eggs.
Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb.
Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks.
They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was 'theoretically possible' that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.
He claimed it would be ethically 'almost the same' as existing techniques.
Details of the major research programme were unveiled at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Madrid.
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