I’m not even sure what to say about this story. It is simply so evil and heartbreaking. From Wesley J. Smith over at the National Review:
Women in Mexico were paid $1400 to be hyperstimulated so their ovaries released bountiful eggs instead of one during their cycle. They then underwent artificial insemination, resulting in early pregnancy with multiple embryos, which were then flushed out of their bodies for study. From the NPR story:
Researchers have conducted a controversial study that involved paying dozens of young women at a hospital near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to get artificially inseminated so their embryos could be flushed out of their bodies and analyzed for research purposes. The study showed that embryos created that way appear to be as healthy genetically as embryos created through standard in vitro fertilization. Physically, the embryos appear to, possibly, even be healthier, the study found…
In addition, some women underwent surgical or chemical abortions afterward, when tests indicated some of the embryos might not have been successfully removed. Some of the surviving embryos were later used to impregnate other women. Others were frozen.
This “experiment” was very wrong on at least four fronts. First, it created human life for the purpose of experimenting upon it. Second, it paid women to have abortions (when all the embryos were not flushed). Third, it treated women as objects, merely as “a Petri dish,” to quote bioethicist Lorie Zoloth (with whom I have had my differences in the past, but not here). Fourth, hyperstimulation can have serious side effects, even leading to occasional death. Add in the likelihood that the women were very poor, and you have a real exploitive circumstance.
We’ve commodified and dehumanized pre-born children so effectively that we can bring them into existence for the express purpose of killing them and experimenting on them. What an awful and morally bankrupt culture we inhabit.
