Monday 15 April 2013

BPAS: sending dead baby girls for research

The last few years has seen increasing attention and opposition to sex selective abortion (abortion sought because of the sex of the child, usually a girl). Groups like All Girls Allowed campaign to expose and oppose sex selective abortion.

This practise was and remains widespread in China, India, Asian communities in the West (including the UK), Georgia, and other countries in eastern Europe. On 3 October 2011 The Council of Europe passed a resolution condemning most sex selective abortions in Council of Europe member states, with the exception of sex-linked genetic disorders i.e. eugenic sex-selective abortion. A similar Bill in America was proposed in May 2012 but defeated. In February 2012 Britain's Daily Telegraph published its undercover investigation on sex selective abortion in the UK, leading to the suspension of some doctors filmed authorising abortions based on the sex of the child. Sex-selective abortion receives both support and ambivalence from abortion groups. UK based Voice for Choice coalition, which British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) is a member of, published an open letter of support for abortionists, claiming that sex-selective abortion is not gender discrimination or a cause of gender discrimination. Sex-selective abortion highlights the paradox of campaigning for abortion as a woman's rights issue yet condemning innocent baby girls to death at the hands of an abortionist simply for being girls, which is profoundly anti-woman.

Looking through the website of Bpas includes past and current research projects. I found one, amongst many, that is particularly appalling. It's called "Modelling prenatal Oogenesis" which says "women attending for termination of pregnancy are given the opportunity to donate their foetal tissue [the body of the baby girl just killed] to be used for research purposes. The human oocytes are studied in vitro..." The screen shot is below, including the URL. Read it for yourself. Bpas is offering the bodies of baby girls they have killed, for research on their ovaries. It appears the research is being carried out at Warwick Medical School under the leadership of Professorial fellow Geraldine Hartshorne. I have emailed Prof. Hartshorne twice and received no reply. I have emailed Dr. Patricia Lohr, medical director of Bpas and received a short reply telling me that published studies on this research could be found on PubMed.


Recently a report appeared in Britain's Daily Mail about researchers who have almost finalised a procedure by which ovaries from aborted babies girls will be used for IVF. The news was announced at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Madrid. The procedure has been trialled by researchers in Holland and Israel. It involves tissue from seven baby girls aborted at between 22 and 33 weeks. Slices of their ovarian tissue were grown in a culture of chemicals and hormones. Over four weeks, the follicles matured to the stage just before an egg appears.

The abortion and fertility industries are showing us ever more destructive ways to kill and commodify children, especially baby girls. 
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