(Oregon Right to Life) — Researchers with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) this week announced progress in research involving the creation of new human embryos using human skin cells. Framed as a way to treat infertility, the research provokes profound ethical concerns.
On Tuesday, September 30, OHSU announced that researchers “accomplished a unique proof of concept to treat infertility by turning skin cells into eggs capable of producing early human embryos.” The research, anticipated to offer “a potential avenue for in vitro gametogenesis — the process of creating gametes” was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
The published research resulted in the creation of 82 early human embryos through a process of transplanting “the nucleus of a skin cell into an egg, or oocyte, stripped of its own nucleus,” then fertilizing it with sperm using IVF.
According to OHSU, the majority of the fertilized oocytes (zygotes) “did not progress beyond the 4-8 cell stage and displayed chromosomal abnormalities.” Just 9% developed to the blastocyst stage, and “[n]one were cultured beyond that point.”
If such research continues, it will pave the way for in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), enabling the creation of new human beings in laboratories using skin cells, including the skin cells of more than two parents.
READ: What’s The Deal With IVF?
Oregon Right to Life Executive Director Lois Anderson responded to the announcement in a Thursday statement, describing the research as “ethically fraught” and “disturbing.”
“OHSU’s disturbing announcement is presented as important progress toward a solution to infertility,” Anderson said. “In reality, the report presents a bleak image of research conducted with a total lack of respect for human dignity. According to the report, OHSU researchers created 82 unique human lives, who had no ability to consent, for the purpose of conducting ethically fraught experimentation and then allowing them to die.”
“Unethical research like this treats human life as a disposable product,” she continued. “We profoundly disagree with this dangerous misconception of human value, and deplore its adoption by those who should be committed to saving lives rather than destroying them.”
“Unlike OHSU and its research team, we believe that every human being deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, and their lives should always be protected,” she concluded. “Experiments like those recently conducted by OHSU researchers are deeply problematic because they treat unique and unrepeatable lives like commodities to be created and destroyed at will.”
Oregon Right to Life isn’t alone in seeing such research – and techniques like IVG – as dangerous practices that treat human lives as products to be bought and sold.
Bioethicists have long expressed concerns that the type of research currently being conducted by OHSU commodifies human life.
“IVG extends the faulty logic of IVF by introducing additional steps to the process of manipulating the origins of the human person, in order to satisfy the desires of customers and consumers,” Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told Catholic News Agency in a 2017 interview. He said techniques like IVG “enable a consumerist mentality that holds that children are ‘projects’ to be realized through commercial transactions and laboratory techniques of gamete manipulation.”
In addition, he expressed concern that the technology has the potential for “introducing further fractures into parenthood, distancing children from their parents by multiplying the number of those involved in generating the child, so that 3-parent embryos, or even more parents, may become involved.”
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In addition to the ethical concerns about the research, it remains questionable whether the aims of the experiments are even possible.
Oregon Right to Life Education Foundation board president Deborah Canepa, Ph.D., expressed doubt that the experiments could ever yield the results researchers are hoping to attain.
“There is something called genomic imprinting,” Canepa, a retired biology professor from Linfield University who taught anatomy and embryology for over 30 years, said in a Thursday email. “Most genes are expressed in a way that is independent of parental origin. However, the expression of certain genes is determined by whether the gene is inherited from the female or male parent.”
Canepa added that “paternal imprinting seems to selectively turn off certain genes involved in development of the embryo itself, whereas maternal imprinting seems to turn off some genes involved in the formation of extraembryonic structures such as the placenta.”
Due to the complexities of genomic imprinting, Canepa said, “it is doubtful if this technique can ever be successful.”
OHSU researchers estimate that “a decade of further research” is likely necessary “before the approach could be deemed safe or effective enough to advance to a clinical trial, even assuming such a trial would be permitted in the United States.”
Meanwhile, this isn’t the first or only reason that OHSU’s actions have triggered serious concerns and opposition from pro-life advocates.
OHSU actively performs extreme late-term abortions on babies up to 34 weeks gestation, according to Abortion Finder. Babies at this stage of pregnancy are well past the age of “viability” – typically considered to be roughly 22-26 weeks – and can feel pain and survive outside the womb.
Informed by scientific research and bioethics, Oregon Right to Life holds that the natural process of human conception (e.g., the union of egg and sperm within the maternal body) provides the safest and most supportive environment for the maturation of the newly created human being. It opposes any fertility treatments that involve fertilization occurring outside the maternal body and leading to the destruction of human life, whether for family growth or experimentation.
Recognizing the distress felt by couples experiencing infertility, Oregon Right to Life supports natural, life-affirming methods available to help couples conceive, including Natural Procreative Technology and Gamete Intra-Fallopian Transfer (GIFT).
