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Scientists have demonstrated that they can use human stem cells to create human eggs, which they claim are viable. Their next planned step is to fertilize them and grow a fetus to term. It’s quite an exciting development. However, has anyone sat back to ask if this is a good idea?

Apparently not. Instead, they’ve focused on ways to market what they’ve done. And they didn’t have to look far. Immediately, they decided that it would cure menopause!

No, this isn’t a joke. They really think that they a natural and normal process is a disease that should be fixed.

Menopause, An Invented Disease

Medicine has long considered menopause to be a disease. In an attempt to cure that disease, they created one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated, hormone replacement therapy (HRT). After decades of automatically putting women on HRT, the truth finally came out. None of the claims made for it were true. It actually proved to be a cause of the very things they’d said it prevented:

• Breast cancer risk increased.
• Deep vein thrombosis (blood clots) risk increased.
• Heart attacks increased.
• Strokes increased.
• Endometrial cancer increased.
• Ovarian cancer may be increased.

No one knows how many women died early and suffered from these diseases as a direct result of trusting that their doctors knew best and accepting the medical paradigm of menopause as a disease.

And now they’re at it again! The Independent reports:

Some scientists are even suggesting the possibility of producing an “elixir of youth” for women, where the menopause is eradicated and older women will retain the health they enjoyed when younger.

There’s no question about the truth of that statement. The inventor of the system that creates human eggs, Dr. Jonathan Tilly of Harvard University, says precisely that.

Isn’t it interesting that this so-called evidence-based system of treatment presumes that menopause brings on poor health? Where’s the evidence? How do they explain that men, who have no equivalent to menopause—except when they try to invent one to treat with drugs—live significantly shorter lives than women do?

Petrie Dish Babies?

Apparently, these researchers aren’t interested in the evidence of experience, either. As pointed out by Mary Aspinwall in What Price Fertility? Avoid IVF with Homeopathy in regard to in vitro fertilization:

Even non-multiple IVF births carry significantly higher risks for the babies—heart defects, cleft lips and palates, and blocked or missing parts of the esophageal or anorectal tract, according to a 2008 analysis of data collected in the National Birth Defects Study in the US.

And a study in the October 2007 Journal of Chinese Medicine confirmed that ill effects may follow IVF children into adulthood. Researchers found that men conceived through IVF had a 46% lower sperm concentration and 45% lower sperm count than other men in the same age group. (No reliable studies relating to the fertility of IVF-born females is available.)

Children born of in vitro fertilization, which utilizes normally developed eggs harvested from women’s ovaries, are suffering from debilitating birth defects. Doesn’t this mean anything to these researchers? How likely is it that lab-created eggs will be able to produce consistently healthy babies?

Just because it can be done does not mean that it should be done. Satisfying curiosity is a normal desire. Nonetheless, ethics and morality surely must be factored into the picture. Is curiosity a good enough reason to play with the creation of human—or any other—life?

In this case, profits are an even greater part of  the motive than honest curiosity. In fact, lead researcher Jonathan Tilly has already set up a corporation, OvaScience Inc, for just that purpose.

Money truly is the root of all evil.

Here is a video of Tilly discussing his invention:

 

Zirconicusso’s Graphics on FreeDigitalPhotos

Sources:

• HRT: Risks
• Scientists ‘to fertilise stem cell egg this year’ and may one day be able to reverse the menopause
• Ovary Stem Cells Can Produce New Human Eggs, Scientists Say
• Ovarian Stem Cells Make Human Eggs in Possible Aid to Fertility
• Scientists Use Stem Cells to Generate Human Eggs in the Lab