Ban fresh embryo donations, ethics adviser insist
Published: Wednesday, June 28, 2006
The Vancouver Sun, Margaret Munro, CanWest News Service
An ethics adviser to the country's lead health research agency continues to call for a ban on the donation of days-old human embryos until policies are in place to better protect the donors.
"I believe that a moratorium should continue until a national position is developed," says Dr. Jeffrey Nisker, a medical ethicist at the University of Western Ontario and member of the standing committee on ethics that provides advice to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
The CIHR gave conditional approval last week for a controversial project to use "fresh," as well as frozen, human embryos for stem cell research.
Nisker says he is not at liberty to discuss what transpires at CIHR ethics meetings. But he says he continues to support a moratorium on the donation of ``fresh'' embryos until national guidelines are in place to ensure people are not pressured or coerced at fertility clinics into donating days-old embryos they could freeze for future attempts at pregnancy.
"I am not worried about the researchers, I am worried about the physicians,'' says Nisker, who has been calling since last year for the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada to develop policies to ensure doctors do not subtly pressure or coerce patients into giving up their days-old embryos.
The CIHR, in approving the stem-cell project, stipulated that patients be given the option to freeze any extra embryos, donate them to others, destroy them or give them to research. It also said the physician treating patients should not obtain the patients' consent.
"That's a step in the right direction,'' says Nisker, who suspects that means a nurse would broach the topic of embryo donation. He says this could still be a problem, as nurses can be seen as the doctor's representative.
The $523,000 project approved last week has been under review for a year and is to be federally funded through the Canadian Stem Cell Network. It aims to use surplus embryos donated by people who have undergone fertility treatment.
The tiny embryos, composed of just a few cells, would be destroyed as the researchers try to harvest embryonic stem cells. The hope is that understanding of the cells might one day lead to treatments for everything from Parkinson's to heart disease.
The project will be led by researchers in Toronto and involve teams in Vancouver and Hamilton.
CIHR's approval is conditional on receipt of consent forms and other documents, say officials at CIHR, who have posted details on the web.
CIHR says it is committed to openness but meetings and discussions about the project were held behind closed doors.
Dr. Francoise Baylis, an ethicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, has expressed her own concerns about coercion of embryo donors. She has also raised questions about the way CIHR rewrote this country's research rules in June 2005 to explicitly allow stem-cell researchers to use fresh human embryos.
There are many surplus frozen embryos stored in fertility clinics, but researchers have had little luck harvesting viable stem cells from them.
CanWest News Service
© CanWest News Service 2006
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