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Women don't need to risk theirhealth with egg donationKatrina George | The Age, November 18, 2009 Three years after embryonic stem cell cloning was legalised in Australia, advocates are finally facing up to the critical issue: where will all the eggs come from? Cloning or somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is impossible without a continuous – and large - supply of women's ova. In South Korea, the now discredited Dr Hwang used 2061 eggs taken from 169 women and failed to produce a single cloned embryo. Loane Skene from the Melbourne Law School at Melbourne University has suggested we should open debate on whether women should be paid for their eggs. This is somewhat surprising given that she was the deputy chairwoman of the 2005 Lockhart committee review into stem cell research that advised against payment for eggs. The committee argued that "the healthiest eggs would be those from young women . . . the potential exists for coercion of young women to donate eggs", pointing to social disadvantage, family or workplace pressures. So what's changed since then that's put egg payment back on the agenda? Certainly not the health risks of egg extraction. Research shows that up to 10 per cent of women who undergo this process experience ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome (OHSS). More serious symptoms of OHSS include renal failure, intrauterine polyps, ovarian cysts, thromboembolism, adult respiratory distress and haemorrhage from ovarian rupture and infertility... What possible justification could there be to ask Australian women to take on the serious health burdens of egg extraction, the risk of cancer later in life, and the commodification of their bodies? Once upon a time scientists might have believed in good faith that this was necessary because embryonic cloning was the only way to obtain pluripotent stem cells. Women's eggs, they thought, were needed for therapies and cures. But that was before November 2007. That's when what one analyst called the "earthquake for both the science and ethics of stem cells" rocked the world. Two teams of scientists published a new technique of reprogramming adult cells like skin cells to an embryonic state without using a single egg or a single embryo...
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We didn’t need Karl Lagerfeld’s recent ‘‘nobody wants to see curvy women’’ clanger to highlight the urgent need for action on body image dissatisfaction. About one in 100 adolescent girls develops anorexia, the third most common chronic illness within that group in Australia. About one in five students suffer bulimia nervosa and up to 19 per cent of these young Australians will die from the condition. The proposed National Strategy on Body Image released this week is a welcome step forward. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.