Limbaugh apologized and withdrew the “acting” suggestion moments after making it. He did make the very legitimate point that Fox
admitted in his book going off his meds in order to make his symptoms more dramatic before testifying before congressional committees- and asked the very reasonable question whether he might be trying to manipulate the people of Missouri the same way. Since the ad itself is a gross emotional appeal and itself a form of manipulation, it’s a doubly valid question.

There are real ethical objections to using living human embryos for spare parts, and the suggestion that anyone with moral qualms about it is opposed to curing Parkinson’s is as absurd as it is rancid. That is the clear implication of the Fox ad. It is a blatant emotional appeal that simply sidesteps the entire substance of the controversy.

BTW, fetal stem cell research has yet to yield a single cure for anything. Dozens of cures, on the other hand, have been achieved through the use of adult stem cells- which have the advantage of not causing tumors, as fetal stem cells often do, when injected into the brains of Parkinson’s patients like Fox!

Ah, I see. A mere random observation.

Never mind.

Though that hatred- if such there be- does seem to be rather well requited, actually.

“There are real ethical objections to using living human embryos for spare parts.”

But apparently there are no real ethical objections to throwing them in the trash instead of using them in a productive manner to preserve life? Because that’s what we currently do.

“fetal stem cell research has yet to yield a single cure for anything”

Well, I guess all research should just be discontinued unless it has produced results before the fact. Cancer research has yet to produce a cure for cancer, why continue it?

Kelly, I think every anti-abortion activist out there would have very strong problems with them being thrown in the trash.

Talk with each other, not at each other. Try to understand rather than demonize.

You, too, GC.

Now, tell us how you *really* feel, hmm?

Also, right on.

“Kelly, I think every anti-abortion activist out there would have very strong problems with them being thrown in the trash.”

Really? That’s strange, because they’ve been doing it at fertility clinics for years and I haven’t heard any anti-abortion activists say anything about them.

I really don’t have any desire to understand an ignorant moron.

Despite the national soul-searching stirred up by stem cell research, human embryos are discarded all the time in fertility clinics – and hardly anyone seems to mind.

At one Bay Area clinic, they are flushed down the drain in a metal sink. At another, a technician drops them into a medical waste bin, to be picked up and incinerated by hospital staff.

At still another, a “quiet area” is set aside in the lab, where frozen embryos are thawed and allowed to live out their last days – usually no more than three or four at most.

“We have to follow the wishes of the patient,” said Dr. Carl Herbert, president of the San Francisco Fertility Centers, which operates two clinics in the city. “It’s up to them to decide what happens to their own embryos.”

President Bush’s decision to limit federal funding of stem cell research to 60 embryonic stem cell colonies has, he said in a televised speech two weeks ago, one primary goal: to avoid destroying any more embryos.

Cost efficiency

But the creation and destruction of human embryos is part and parcel of modern infertility treatments, reflecting both the inherent inefficiency of human reproduction and efforts by fertility clinics to keep costs down and success rates as high as possible.

Now, the stem cell controversy has begun raising the political stakes at the same time medical technology keeps pushing the limits of human fertility. So the number of surplus embryos stored in the nation’s approximately 360 in vitro fertilization clinics promises to increase.

No one knows how many exist already, but some claim the number may be close to 200,000 – not counting the many others that are discarded immediately without being frozen.

Critics of federally financed stem cell research maintain tax dollars should not be used for anything that results in deliberate destruction of an embryo. On the other side, people with diseases that might be treated using stem cells argue that research is a more noble use for unwanted embryos than the alternatives otherwise being offered.

Looming issue

In fact, even the anti-abortion movement, which portrays embryos as “pre- born children,” has paid little attention to discarded embryos. But that may be changing now that the stem cell controversy has erupted.

“It really hasn’t been a focus before now, but I think it’s increasingly going to become a focus,” said William Saunders, senior fellow at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. “The stem cell debate has kind of made a lot of people stop and wonder why all these embryos were frozen in the first place.”

The simple answer is that it takes a lot of embryos to produce a few babies – both in nature and in assisted-reproduction laboratories.

“Embryos are being created all the time, and they’re also being used all the time,” said Dr. David Adamson, a clinical professor at Stanford University and director of Fertility Physicians of Northern California, an IVF clinic in Palo Alto.

Patients at such clinics are typically couples or single women so desperate to have children they are willing to pay fees running into tens of thousands of dollars for technology to help them become pregnant.

Eggs are retrieved from the client or can be donated by someone else, and are mixed with sperm from the male partner or a donor. An embryo is produced when a single sperm and egg join.

In nearly all cases, more embryos are created than wound up being used in a single attempt at a pregnancy. To better the odds of pregnancy, clinics may create six to 14 embryos per patient, implanting perhaps two or three while freezing the healthiest of those remaining. These can be thawed and used later if a repeat attempt is needed, although about 25 percent of the embryos stored this way do not survive.

Patients have the option of donating their leftover embryos to another infertile couple. That is rarely done, however, particularly when the couple use their own eggs and sperm.

“It’s their genetic material,” noted Dr. Marcelle Cedars at the University of California at San Francisco’s IVF clinic. “Some people may not want their genetic material walking around this earth in that kind of situation.”

Few rules prevail

As long as patients give consent, few rules dictate what happens to the embryos that are not implanted. The noteable exception is in the state of Louisiana, which has bestowed a legal status equivalent to personhood on live embryos and outlawed their destruction.

“It bestows on the embryos certain rights,” said Dr. Steven Taylor, co- director of the Fertility Institute of New Orleans, a private IVF clinic. “They cannot be experimented on. They cannot be destroyed. If we freeze them and thaw them, it has to be with the intent of implanting them in a woman’s uterus.”

In California, IVF patients and clinics pretty much can decide on their own what to do, although nearly all clinics adhere to a set of voluntary protocols to maintain accreditation through a joint program of the College of American Pathologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Federal controls are being developed as well to ensure proper equipment and procedures are used.

A nationwide survey in 1998, sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed practices vary somewhat from one clinic to the next. In a few cases, clinic officials even said they discarded excess embryos or used them for training purposes without patient consent.

That same year, the most recent for which statistics are available, about 28,000 IVF babies were born in the United States, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a nonprofit professional organization for IVF clinics.

But no one can say for sure how many embryos were created to achieve that result, nor how many of those were discarded or placed into deep freeze.

One widely cited estimate puts the number of frozen embryos in the United States at 188,000. But experts said that was little more than a guess, and even if it was accurate at one time, it is long out of date now. Plans for what would be the first careful national accounting are being prepared now by the reproductive medicine society.

Even a guess is hard to come by as to how many embryos might have been destroyed in IVF clinics ever since the first IVF baby debuted in England in 1978. By all accounts, it’s likely to be in the hundreds of thousands – compared with perhaps a few dozen that have perished for the purpose of creating lines of stem cells.

Stored in ‘straws’

At the UCSF clinic, Dr. Marcelle Cedars took a look recently and counted about 3,300 embryos in storage, all cryopreserved in thin “straws,” receptacles that resemble extra-long coffee-stirrers, in tanks of liquid nitrogen.

It’s a constantly changing number, she said, with embryos moving in and out of storage nearly every day, according to the needs and wishes of infertile couples that created the embryos.

One reason so many embryos wind up in storage is that infertile couples tend to be in no hurry to make any decisions. Clinics typically charge a storage fee, about $200 or $300 a year, but long-term storage is not at all unusual. With current freezing techniques, it seems possible for frozen embryos to survive for decades.

“Sometimes people take a very long time to make these decisions,” said Dr. Richard Chetkowski, medical director of the Alta Bates IVF Program in Berkeley,

which has held some embryos as long as six years.

If it seems a harsh affair, fertility specialists point out that a very small percentage of embryos survive the natural reproduction cycle, either.

Out of all the embryos created by sexual intercourse, roughly 3 out of 4 do not last long enough to produce a baby. About half of the fertilized eggs are lost even before the woman misses her first period following conception.

Doctors insist that it’s unrealistic to expect technology to do much better at preserving the lives of early-stage embryos. Human reproduction is “a very inefficient process,” Cedars said, adding that she finds it “difficult to afford a higher status to embryos than nature does.”

“All we’re doing is taking part of the process out into the laboratory,” she said. “There isn’t any intentional destruction of embryos.”

Kelly, you must not have heard because you’re too busy not listening to those you pre-judge as “ignorant morons”. A quick google turned up this program for adopting embryos that would otherwise be deemed medical waste:

http://www.nightlight.org/snowflakeadoption.htm

I really believe that your kind of attitude is more corrosive to this country than any political stance anyone might have. It’s the kind of attitude that infects Palestine and Israel, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Ruwanda, the Sudan, and so forth. Vigorous debate is healthy. Hatred for those who disagree with you or believe differently is not.