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From: marty1@houem.UUCP (M.BRILLIANT)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: Re: Aborted Babies: Medical Spare Parts
Message-ID: <653@houem.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Oct-86 11:52:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: houem.653
Posted: Tue Oct  7 11:52:23 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Oct-86 10:43:50 EDT
References: <2622@watdcsu.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 37

In <2622@watdcsu.UUCP>, mberkley@watdcsu.UUCP (J.M.Berkley - Computing
Services) wrote:

>This is a quote from Scientific American, Aug 1986...
>
>	....  The likeliest
>	source of embryonic neurons for transplantation to human
>	beings, however, appears to be tissue from aborted fetuses."
>
>....  The application in human beings is obvious: give
>mobility back to people with spinal cord injuries.
>
>The problem is that this makes human abortions into a
>factory process: use aborted babies as spare parts.
> ...
>The aborted fetus is a human baby.  How can we allow a woman's body
>to be used in this way? ...

That's backwards.  The woman presumably had an abortion because she
_didn't_ want her "body to be used" to produce a baby.  The use of the
fetus for spare parts is a way to get some value from the lost fetus
and "give mobility back to people with spinal cord injuries."

> ...  Next thing they will be paying women to have
>abortions just as they pay for blood donors in some states.

We are already paying women to have babies for other women who can't
have babies.  They do it voluntarily.  The actual problems are not so
much ethical as legal: is the surrogate-mother contract legally
binding?  If a woman doesn't want to bear a child, but wants to be paid
to provide spare parts so that a person with a spinal cord injury can
walk again, everybody gains -- provided the woman's own ethical
principles don't tell her otherwise.

M. B. Brilliant					Marty
AT&T-BL HO 3D-520	(201)-949-1858
Holmdel, NJ 07733	ihnp4!houem!marty1