Final Report (all chapters)

A 2003 news story published in Popular Science magazine describes in some detail the
motivation for performing this procedure, and the procedure itself. 32 The technique is used to
cure particularly difficult cases of infertility. In this case, the wife’s reproductive organs were
severely dysfunctional, and her immune system had rejected her husband’s sperm. In addition,
the husband’s sperm count was very low and of poor quality. After traditional reproductive
treatments failed to result in pregnancy, the couple was persuaded to try co-culture. The
woman’s eggs were retrieved, fertilized in vitro, and grown for several days on tissue obtained
from a cow uterus. The embryos were then transferred back into the woman’s uterus. The
technique was quite successful. The couple now has three children, all of them conceived
through co-culture.
The story provides an excellent illustration of both parental desperation and of the risky
choices parents and their doctors are willing to make. According to the news story the couple is
not apologetic for trying a largely untested technique. Asked whether he was concerned about
possible long-term effects on his children the father replied:
Is there a possibility of long-term effects? Yeah, there is. And that worries us. But even if we’d
found the kids would be at higher risk, we would have still done it all. 33
As this quote illustrates, there seems to be some justification to the view that parents do not
necessarily or always have the best interest of their offspring at heart. More generally, our
discussion of co-culture suggests that innovative reproductive treatments should not be
performed on a routine basis until safety and ethical concerns have not properly been addressed.
To this end, it is necessary to broaden the debate about the future of reproductive technologies
beyond the narrow circle of ART practitioners and patient groups.
4.3.4 Other Experiments
That some reproductive endocrinologists and scientists are willing to push the ethical
envelope is illustrated by the following two instances of (failed) innovative reproductive
treatments. In the first case, a group of Israeli scientists demonstrated that oocytes retrieved from
aborted fetuses can be fertilized and may be viable. In the second case, a U.S. researcher created
a chimeric human embryo by adding cells from a male embryo to a female human embryo.
Oocytes grown from aborted fetuses – to our knowledge – have not actually been used in a
clinical setting. Had the fertilized eggs in the aforementioned case been transferred to a woman’s
uterus, a child might have been conceived by an unborn mother – a very problematic proposition
at best, and an utterly unacceptable procedure at worst. As for other innovative treatments, there
is a perfectly plausible, if purely instrumental, reason for developing this procedure. The Israeli
scientists argued that aborted fetuses are a precious source of human tissue, and that retrieving
oocytes from these fetuses would circumvent many of the ethical problems normally associated
with the retrieval of human oocytes from adult females. That this argument is incomplete goes
32
33
Rebecca Skloot, "Sally Has 2 Mommies and 1 Daddy," Popular Science, March 1, 2003.
Ibid.
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