Consider the social ramifications: Fetal tissue transplants (Part I)

Late stage cervical cancer necessitated the total removal
of uterus, forcing termination of pregnancy // drsuparna

This is part one of a project celebrating the life and impact of Carl Sagan. For complete details, click here.

In 1963, America was in agony. Thousands were suffering from rashes, swollen glands, low weight, blindness, mental retardation, heart defects, crushing fevers, schizophrenia, and a whole host of related developmental disorders. Between 1963 and 1964, an estimated twelve million people were infected. Twenty thousand infants were born prematurely, or physically disabled. 6,250 women spontaneously aborted. Another five thousand chose to induce abortion, rather than suffer, or have their child suffer from the problems associated with Congential Rubella Syndrome (CRS)

Thanks to one of those latter women, this disease is no longer a problem. In 1962, infected tissue taken from her would-be daughter was transferred from the fetus's lung to a cell culture where it was used to create the vaccine used to prevent Rubella from returning. Since licensing, that culture, known as WI-38, has saved millions of lives. From a height of twelve million infected and twenty thousand seriously impaired in 1963, there were just twenty-three cases in 2001, with only eleven reporting CRS.*

Research utilizing fetal tissue is fairly common in many medical programs. The cell culture of WI-38 is used in the Chickenpox, MMR and Shingles vaccine. MRC-5, a cell culture derived from a 14 week old fetus is used for chickenpox, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Typhoid, Smallpox and Polio. In fact, we owe the eradication of polio to the use of fetal tissue. In 1948, a research team run by John Enders discovered how to grow the poliomyelitis virus using human tissue cultures developed in the laboratory. He later received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this work. For many of these diseases alternative non-human cultures are unavailable due to ineffectiveness, fear of animal virus contamination or in the case of chickenpox, simply not working on anything other than human tissue.

   Recovery from dermal ulcers
treated with fetal tissue transplant

Recently, fetal cell therapy has been used to treat, with dramatic effect, cases of chronic leg ulcers. Dermal tissue taken from a 14-week aborted fetus was grown in culture, embedded within a collagen matrix and applied as a sort of salve. Patients displayed immediate loss of pain or itching, and rapid closure and healing of the ulcerated area with little to no residual scar tissue. Tissue from fetal donors shows strong promise to treat or cure a variety of degenerative mental and physiological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, spinal paralysis and Alzheimers, diseases which currently effect many millions of people in this country. Alzheimers alone harms 5.3 million, and costs $148 billion in healthcare coverage per year.

Many who are reading this may find this use of aborted fetal tissue repugnant, immoral or even criminal. Anti-abortion activists have long maintained concern over the use fetal cells, fearing the growth of an industry which might make abortion even more of an in-demand service. Alternatively, some fear the development of for-profit organ harvesting, in severe violation of the right to body and privacy they feel all people have, from the moment of conception onward. Even if you do not share this belief, these concerns are legitimate. The ability to retrieve intact tissue may come directly at the expense and safety of the woman receiving the procedure. Different methods are required, such as the partial-birth abortion (aka intact-dilation and extraction) to retrieve, say a fully intact brain, then are necessary to perform pregnancy termination.

There is also the strong ethical problem related to our ability to clone and grow tissue outside of a body. Should we allow women to get pregnant, abort the fetus and use the cells to grow organs which may be used as transplants in case of later accidents in life?  What about the ethics of men who wish for their own batch of ready-grown organs? Do we risk the creation of a class of women who get pregnant solely for the purpose of aborting the fetus at the behest of their client? Currently, the law works to prevent these issues from arising, making the donation of fetal organs from one individual to a specified other illegal. As we further develop our technology, this may change and we owe it to ourselves to be prepared with the facts, in order to make the best decision possible.

Polio iron-lung ward, 1953 // Wiki

As a final point, for those who are so adamantly against abortion that they stand against fetal tissue use in medical practice, consider the following. In 1988, Polio paralyzed approximately three-hundred fity thousand children around the world. At its peak, Congenital Rubella Syndrome destroyed the lives of another twenty-five thousand American citizens. Hep-A infects about twenty-five thousand people a year, Hep-B around fourty-three thousand. Thanks to vaccination and cleanliness of living, only about four-hundred cases of Typhoid occur per year in the United States, but worldwide, that number is an estimated twenty-one million. Imagine what the world would look like today, if we never cured polio, or typhoid, or developed treatments for Hepatitis. Is that a world you want to live in?

By standing against these medical advances, it is true that you may minutely dampen the number of abortions performed in a given year. You would also be dooming untold millions to suffer from debilitating liver disease, anemia, microcephaly, paralysis, deafness, mental retardation, cognitive degeneration, intestinal hemorrhage, ulcerated lesions, and hundreds of other preventable or treatable illnesses.

*Measles, Mumps and Rubella are currently on the rise due to a concerted effort by a vocal swath of Americans who raise ignorant fears about impossible side-effects related to vaccination, but that is an issue for another article.

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