Feminists Choosing Life of New York to Appeal Lower Court Ruling in Egg Donor Compensation Suit

To Protect Women from Exploitation as Egg Donors and Enforce the NY Legislature's Ban on Taxpayer Money Going to Advance Human Cloning, Feminists Choosing Life of New York Will Appeal Flawed Lower Court Ruling

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Sept. 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Feminists Choosing Life of New York has cleared the way for the Appellate Division, Third Department, to hear FCLNY's challenge to the State Health Department's payment-for-eggs program.  If allowed to stand, the State's scheme would use taxpayers' dollars to pay economically vulnerable young women to undergo risky procedures so researchers can use their eggs to create cloned embryos for embryonic stem cell research.  FCLNY filed a notice of appeal after a Court of Claims appointee rejected its challenge to the program and ruled in essence that the courts cannot look at the legality of this program until a woman is injured due to the egg donation process and brings suit.  The trial court's hyper-technical approach does not square up with the law or with common sense.  

In the egg retrieval process, a woman is prescribed a drug to trick her body into a chemically-induced menopause (often through off-label use of a prostate cancer drug linked to birth defects). She is then given drugs to cause super-ovulation to bring about the maturation of multiple eggs at once, followed by another drug which triggers the final stages of egg maturation. Finally, she undergoes anesthesia and a surgical procedure where a needle is inserted though the vagina to puncture her ovaries for the collection of the eggs via suction. This process entails risks associated with ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome which can cause in the short-term stroke, pulmonary embolism, kidney damage, clotting disorders, and even death.  Longer-term risks can result in problems with her fertility and increased incidences of certain cancers.  

The unknown consequences of these procedures for young fertile women, along with the very speculative benefits of egg-based research, are of great concern.  Evidence submitted to the lower court, including an affidavit by Jennifer Lahl, founding director of The Center for Bioethics and Culture, challenges the notion of genuinely informed patient consent among these research egg donors.   Lahl warns that New York's payment-for-eggs program "unfairly targets women who may not meet the higher criteria of donating in the more lucrative private fertility market and yet are financially enticed to earn money to pay bills and other expenses, particularly during these difficult economic times." Lahl recently produced a documentary entitled Eggsploitation, which had its New York premier at an FCLNY event.  http://www.feministschoosinglife.org (reviews and comments).  

FCLNY maintains that the payment-for-eggs program exploits women's bodies by using taxpayer monies to entice a young woman to undergo a risky medical procedure to retrieve eggs from her finite supply for speculative research.  No wonder New York stands as the only state in the Union to allow the use of public funds above and beyond out-of-pocket costs to compensate and to lure women to undergo egg retrieval for research.     We have no doubt that the Appellate Division will recognize exploitation when it sees it.  

We will also ask the Appellate Division to correct the lower court's failure to enforce our Legislature's strict ban on using tax dollars to hasten the day when whole human beings will be cloned.  

Going outside the evidence presented by the parties, the judge concluded after conducting his own internet research that the only type of cloning that could aid stem cell research was the kind used to clone Dolly the Sheep in 1996. The judge upheld taxpayer funding for this kind of cloning.  But, of course, such cloning is the mainstay of scientists today working to duplicate full-blown human persons, the very work our Legislature said New York cannot support 'directly or indirectly.'  The judge wholly ignored breakthroughs in stem cell research using reprogrammed adult cells cloned to create stem cells as versatile and promising as any egg-derived stem cells; he ignored these advances even though the State's own expert acknowledged them at length.      

We are hopeful and confident the Appellate Division will reverse the trial court.  It will render a decision reflecting the current state of science. And it will vindicate the will of New York's citizenry as expressed by an unequivocal statutory prohibition against using funds "directly or indirectly" for research involving human clones.  New York aspires to be the Empire State not the Petri dish for a Brave New World.

CONTACT: Jean Baric of Feminists Choosing Life of New York, +1-585-323-9149 or [email protected]

SOURCE Feminists Choosing Life of New York