Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!lll-crg!nike!oliveb!trash
From: trash@oliveb.UUCP (Tom Repa)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: Re: Aborted Babies: Medical Spare Parts
Message-ID: <89@oliveb.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Oct-86 18:22:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: oliveb.89
Posted: Tue Oct  7 18:22:36 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Oct-86 10:44:49 EDT
References: <2622@watdcsu.UUCP>
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
Lines: 54

in <2622@watdcsu.UUCP> Mike Berkley writes: 
> This is a quote from Scientific American, Aug 1986.  The article is
> "Transplantation in the Central Nervous System" by Alan Fine:
> 
> 	"For the moment transplantation in the central nervous system
> 	of human beings poses an ethical problem.....Nerve cells
> 	derived from certain tumors can be grown in culture and have
> 	been transplanted successfully into rodents.  The likeliest
> 	source of embryonic neurons for transplantation to human
> 	beings, however, appears to be tissue from aborted fetuses."
> 
> The article reports on experiments being done to repair damaged
> nerves (including the spinal cord) of rats by using neural tissue
> from rat 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.
> 
> How do people feel about this?
> 
> The aborted fetus is a human baby.  How can we allow a woman's body
> to be used in this way?  Next thing they will be paying women to have
> abortions just as they pay for blood donors in some states.
> 
> Mike Berkley
> mberkley@watdcsu.UUCP

	The aborted !baby is dead tissue, nothing else. It seems
to me that this is about the same thing as giving your organs to
medical research after your dead. "How can we allow a womans body to 
be used this way"?? Do you think women will be getting pregnant and
getting abortions just to supply researchers? Or perhaps you're
part of that paranoid crowd that thinks that abortionists 'lure'
women into abortions for money? I think you'd have to pay a woman a 
lot to endergo an abortion. They're painful. Plus I think there are 
enough women (unfortunately) already undergoing abortions to take
care of any possible need in this potential research field. And
since the article stated that some of the tissue can be grown
from tumors, I think it much more likely that this route would 
be taken by the researchers, if their research pans out and they
start to work on human tissue, in order to lessen the ethical 
considerations.
	More to the point, the article is about rat brains, not
!baby brains. There are orders of magnitudes of difference between
rat-based neurological research  and human nevous system grafting.

				Tom Repa(trash@oliven)

-- 
  Remember what the Doorknob said:"Feed your head."


Path:	{allegra,glacier,hplabs,ihnp4}!oliveb!oliven!trash