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CLAUDIO SANTANA\/AFP\/Getty<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.
\nBreitbart.com<\/p>\n
Researchers have conducted experiments on dozens of young Mexican women, paying them to be artificially inseminated and then extracting their embryos for analysis, NPR reported Thursday.<\/h3>\n
At a hospital near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, reproductive geneticist Santiago Munne and his team\u00a0injected<\/a>\u00a0the women with powerful hormones to stimulate their ovaries to produce eggs and then inseminated them with donor sperm. After four to six days, the team flushed out any resulting embryos from the uterus via a procedure known as \u201clavage.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the women underwent surgical or chemical abortions afterward, when it was discovered that some embryos might not have been successfully removed.<\/p>\n The stated purpose of the\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0was to discover whether it is clinically feasible to recover living human embryos by uterine lavage from fertile women for \u201cpreimplantation genetic testing\u201d and compare them to similar embryos conceived by in vitro fertilization.<\/p>\n During the course of the experiment, the team harvested a total of 134 living embryos from 81 women they had recruited at Punta Mita Hospital in Mexico. Several of the embryos were eventually implanted in other women, resulting in the birth of three babies, and others were frozen.<\/p>\n While some colleagues have defended the experiment, others have denounced it as exploitative and unethical, suggesting that researchers undertake questionable practices on foreign soil that would be frowned upon in the United States, or what one bioethicist has\u00a0termed<\/a>\u00a0\u201coutsourcing ethics.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat this essentially does is use a woman\u2019s body as a petri dish,\u201d says Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at the University of Chicago. \u201cAnd there\u2019s something about that that seems so profoundly disturbing.\u201d<\/p>\n Zoloth also suggested that paying the women around $1,400 to participate in the experiment \u2014 more than they would make in two months \u2014 may induce them to engage in activities they ordinarily wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u201cI think this research was unethical,\u201d Zoloth said.<\/p>\n According to bioethicist Wesley Smith, the experiment was unethical on at least four fronts: creating human life for the purpose of experimentation, paying women to have abortions, treating women as objects, and dangerous hormonal hyperstimulation.<\/p>\n Munne, who carried out the experiments for CooperGenomics in Livingston, N.J., has defended the research, saying it was approved by the Ministry of Health of the State of Nayarit, in Mexico, as well as by the Western Institutional Review Board in the United States.<\/p>\n \u201cWe passed all the ethical committees and all the ethical checks and balances,\u201d Munne claimed.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have now a method that can produce embryos that are of good quality or better than in vitro fertilization,\u201d Munne said. \u201cThis is the first time that human embryos conceived naturally have been analyzed genetically to see if they are normal or not.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe advantage is that these embryos are conceived naturally \u2014 so you don\u2019t need in vitro fertilization to do the genetic testing of the embryos. In theory, it should be much cheaper,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n