Which Comes First: The Woman or Her Eggs?
By Ruha Benjamin,
Huffington Post
| 04. 17. 2013
[Quotes CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
To Pay or Not to PayImagine two women sitting in a waiting room -- one is a store clerk, and the other is an investment banker -- preparing to donate their eggs for a particular type of stem cell research.* There are some who think that payment could coerce women, especially those who are low-income, to undergo the
invasive procedure.** Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society,
says that restricting payment can help prevent "the emergence of a market in which predominantly poor women are the ones who wind up selling their eggs."
Others insist that women are perfectly capable of weighing their options, and that egg donors should be financially rewarded for their time and trouble. UC Hastings law professor
Radhika Rao contends:
[E]veryone else involved in the production of human embryonic stem cells is entitled to compensation. The researchers who invest intellectual capital and the companies and universities that invest financial capital will surely share in any profits ... so why not those who provide the human capital in the form...
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• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
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