Will politics once again win over humanity? I received an email from the Family Research Council that has once again amazed me at the hard-heartedness of some elected representatives. The article in question can be found at Senate Fails to Act on Cord Blood Stem Cell Bill.

I've been following the stem cell debate both because of its promise of cures for diseases like diabetes, which affects my family, as well as the ethical issues involved. The medical advances are coming out of adult stem cell research, and adult stem cells taken from cord blood provide a humane way of harvesting a sufficiently genetically diverse pool of stem cells to provide cures for many people as opposed to the few who are genetically similar enough to use cells and tissues derived from the few embryonic stem cell lines available.

It is rarely mentioned that the use of stem cells to cure diseases amounts to a tissue transplant with the associated problems of transplant rejection, and the issue of how to develop a big enough pool of stem cell lines to make sufficiently close tissue matching possible is rarely mentioned as well. The number of stem cell lines would be on the order of the number of organ donors that would be needed to cure patients now, and that number is in the thousands.

The usual argument is that therapeutic cloning can be used to make embryonic stem cells from the patient's own DNA. This has at least two serious ethical problems. The one most mentioned is that the cloned embryo is a copy of the patient, thus opening the question of whether a human being is destroyed to obtain the stem cells. There is also issue of whether a tissue derived from embryonic stem cells is stable enough to be useful as a cure and not cause more problems in itself.

However, there is also the question of whether we should exploit women as egg donors by the thousands to provide the necessary eggs for this procedure. The drugs used to stimulate an egg donor's ovaries are harmful to her health, both in the short and long term. This is not a simple and safe procedure. Further, one major research program has already come under fire for allegedly exploiting female research associates as egg donors.

Please think about this and tell your friends about it as well. The promise of medical cures through adult stem cell research is real and in some cases already in use, whereas the promise of medical cures through embryonic stem cell research is still uncertain and now tainted by the alleged abuse of women to obtain eggs for research. This is no longer only a question of exploiting a tiny embryo which would had been destroyed because its parents didn't want additional children. This is also a question of protecting women from exploitation by unethical doctors willing to sacrifice their health for the sake of patients willing to pay for questionable embryonic stem cells cures by any means.

It is medically unsupportable for politicians and political action groups in favor of embryonic stem cell research to continue to stubbornly champion this cause when an effective, safer, non-exploitive alternative is available here and now. Their position is based on political power and expediency rather than the best interests of patients, embryos and women alike. The best use of medical research funds is to develop adult stem cell cures where real progress is already being made.