Should scientists pay women who provide eggs for stem cell research? This involves both a pragmatic and ethical question. Pragmatically – how are scientists going to convince women to undergo the onerous process of hyper-ovulation and egg extraction in the absence of any compensation? Ethically – if society deems stem cell research as worthy of pursuing, and a subset of the community is required to provide the eggs to conduct that research, then egg providers should receive the fair compensation for the socially-valuable role they take on. Of course, this presumes that stem cell research is worth pursuing and stem cell scientists need human eggs to do the research. I’ll assume both answers are yes for now. Prima facie – payment seems fair. And yet payment for egg providers raises concerns about exploitation. As with bananas, blueberries contain good generic viagra cialis fiber content, helping to eliminate “bad” cholesterol which can lead to blockages. With the increasing craze of gadgets viagra uk sale among people, it is also impacting on our sexual life too. Depending over medicine like antidepressants or being damaged nerve to the spinal cord or back would also affect your sexual performance. donssite.com viagra tablets india Being a rich source of vitamins, they should constitute a purchase cialis major chunk of your diet since your body needs them to produce testosterone. Why is that? Exploitation involves the unfair use of someone else’s vulnerability. So strategies for reducing or avoiding exploitation are (1) avoid the use of others vulnerability all together = prohibit that kind of relationship or transaction; or (2) increase the payment so that the vulnerable party receives a fair share. We need to think about whether those who provide eggs are vulnerable; what sort of compensation would be fair (e.g. New York suggests US$5,000-$10,000); and/or whether the exchange of eggs for cash in order to pursue stem cell research is the ‘type’ of relationship we want to socially endorse. Read more in the recent ISSCR position statement on payments for eggs. [NB: the views expressed here are my personal views and do not reflect the views of the ISSCR committee on public policy and ethics.]
Lori Gruen has an interesting 2007 article on this issue in Metaphilosophy.
Worth noting is that some couples / IVF clinics already pay oocyte “donors” large sums, in the context of reproductive IVF. Here is a clinic advertising that those who donate oocytes for reproductive purposes can make up to 6 separate “donations,” receiving up to $48,000: http://eggdonationny.com/why-donate.aspx
If this is permissible in the reproductive context (a big if, of course), then it’s hard to see why it wouldn’t also be permissible in the context of soliciting oocytes just for research purposes. (Setting aside standard issues about creating human embryos for research that destroys them.)
An interesting article that raises issues that interact with the exploitation worries is Mark Moller’s 2008 article on “Unequal biological access,” in the journal Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine. Moller notes that the future therapeutic benefits of hESC research are likely to be less available for non-white populations in the US, if most of that research is conducted on embryos created from white people’s gametes. (This is because of issues to do with immune rejection, as well as with the way that development of diseases varies with ancestry.) Moller recommends creating stem cell banks that are aimed, in part, at an “equal” representation of genotypes in the stem cell pool. (An important question here is what exactly should count as “equal” in this context.) Such stem cell banks would provide a more varied set of stem cell lines for researchers than would reliance on “excess” embryos from reproductive IVF, as these latter embryos tend to be white. Anyway, you can probably see how this interacts with worries that paying women for their oocytes might constitute undue inducements and exploitation, given that many non-white women in the US are more economically vulnerable than the average white woman.
Also, of course, worries about paternalism are very relevant here. (Gruen discusses this.)