Human Life as a Commodity - Marketed and Funded by the Canadian Public Purse
By Jakki Jeffs

In June of 2005 quietly and stealthily the Canadian Institute for Health Research changed the Canadian guidelines regarding human embryo donation, allowing use of “fresh” as well as “frozen” embryos for research - a scientific supermarket where choices abound in fresh and frozen products! Sadly, this is the market where human life is a commodity and super science without ethics abounds. Public funding is required since private investors know embryonic stem cell research is a financial “dead end” . In the United States 15 institutes are involved in stem cell research only two are  in embryonic stem cell research.
           
It has taken a year for the Canadian Institute for Health Research to finally conditionally approve $523,000 public dollars for a project involving the use of “fresh” embryos. Andras Nagy of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital who will head the project was quoted in 2005 as saying, “There are embryos going down the drain all the time...It is a biological waste.”
           
In the foreword to the Canadian guidelines  we read: “Canadians can be assured that the research made possible by federal public funds will be undertaken within a well-defined ethical and legal framework ....”However, the framework considers ethical: the destruction of tiny embryonic children up to the age of 14 days; assigning individuals to ask couples to donate their children to destructive research; having someone ask mothers in abortion facilities across Canada if the body of her aborted child can be used for research after her abortion (donating her offspring for research is not considered a good reason to abort her child!!!); and publicly funding embryonic research which after two decades has shown no hope of helping any illness, injury or disease and is unethical, immoral and unnecessary.
           
Following the 16 year progress of Canada’s efforts regarding reproductive technology I remain astonished when policies speak of not commodifying human life by paying for reproductive material (eggs, sperm or embryos) yet we treat the embryo as a commodity.  The guidelines introduced entities called “embryo providers” “gamete providers” These “providers” have “ownership” of the embryo - but oops let us not commodify human life!
    
In Vitro techniques quality control the children created - Pre-Implantation Genetic Testing may become mandatory in Canada with regards to IVF. Women abort their unwanted children at the rate of over 105,000 a year and couples carrying children with genetic anomalies abort at horrific rates and our guidelines include embryonic human beings in the definition of “reproductive material.”
    
The guidelines also state that “while research on human adult stem cells was not included in the Working Group's mandate, recent scientific research has raised the possibility of isolating adult stem cells with properties similar to embryonic stem cells.”  One has to wonder how deep the sand was in which  this “Working Group” had it’s collective head buried? How can it have failed to hear the 2002 major announcement that stem cells from the bone marrow of adults could turn into “most, if not all” tissues in the body?  In recent years the rapidity with which ethically acceptable sources of stem cells have demonstrated their ability to heal has been unbelievable. Scientists have a huge potential to treat or in some cases even to cure disability and disease - without killing anyone to do so.
    
Adult stem cells have alleviated or cured Parkinsons Disease, heart disease, spinal cord injury, diabetes, Alzheimers disease, stroke and bone disorder. The score board on the website now reads ADULT 72 and EMBRYONIC 0.  Why is Canada publicly funding such obviously useless and unethical research?  Current clinical trials of adult stem cells include treating multiple cancers, autoimmune diseases, anemias, immuno-deficiencies, bone and cartilage deformities, corneal scarring, stroke, repairing of cardiac tissue after heart attack, growth of new blood vessels, gastrointestinal epithelia, wound healing, liver failure to mention a partial list. Professor Geoffrey Raisman, Director of the Spinal Repair Unit at University College, London says of cells taken from the nasal cavity in which nerve fibres are in a continuous state of growth: “This is what will get people out of wheelchairs. This is what will make stroke patients get better. This is what will restore the optic nerve in blindness, and the auditory nerve in deafness.”Significantly he says, “There is no need to use other stem cells”
    
Why fund embryonic research when adult stem cells are the most promising source for treatments?  They generate virtually all adult tissues—multiply almost indefinitely—have proven success in laboratory cultures.  Adult stem cells have the ability to “home in” on the damage, do not present problems with tumor formation and avoid transplant rejection and have no ethical quandary.
    
Canadian guidelines also do not allow the creation of a human being for the sole purpose of research and should always; “Respect individual and community notions of human dignity and physical, spiritual and cultural integrity.”  With respect to this principle one wonders how the human dignity and physical integrity of the embryonic human being is upheld when he has no advocate, is treated as a commodity, his body scavenged for cells and his life destroyed. can we get much lower?
    
Yet, I should not be so harsh with Canada as it seems this blindness has struck working groups all over the world. My question is still the same? Why do bodies like the Canadian Institute for Health Research publically fund research which has no hope of helping anyone when the ethical alternative has been tried and is true? Someone in our legislature needs to ask this question and the public need to demand the asking of it.
   
Jakki Jeffs is the Executive Director of Alliance for Life Ontario.