Editor’s Note: Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America (CWA), presented this testimony in the Maryland Senate regarding Senate Bill 160 on February 23, 2006.

An issue oftentimes neglected in the discussion of cloning is the primary material necessary for cloning: women’s eggs. Any form of human cloning requires vast numbers of women’s eggs.

To give an idea of the numbers, in animal cloning, Dolly the sheep was one success out of 279 embryos. It is unknown how many sheep eggs were used to get 279 embryos.

A common disease that cloning proponents claim could be cured through human cloning research is diabetes. According to Dr. David Prentice, there are approximately 17 million diabetes patients in the U.S. If each patient were to have their own clone from which to extract genetically identical cells, it would take about 800 million eggs. About 10 – 15 eggs can be obtained per extraction, requiring about 80 million women to donate.

Professor Woo-Suk Hwang of South Korea originally minimized the number of human eggs used in his cloning experiments to obtain 11 human embryonic stem cells lines ¯ that is, until his scandal unfolded. He now admits that over 2,000 women’s eggs were obtained for his failed research.

Acquiring eggs is not a simple or safe procedure for women. Women must be injected with potent drugs to cause them to hyperovulate (that is, to produce mature ova in a large number at one time), then a needle inserted to extract the eggs. At least one drug often used has not been tested or approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for this purpose.

Thousands of cases of women suffering complications and at least 23 deaths from these fertility drugs have been reported to the FDA. The FDA estimates only 10 percent of complications from any drug get reported.

In 2004 the United Nations passed a Declaration calling on countries to ban human cloning. Some of the most passionate speeches came from delegates of developing countries, stating that it would be their women ¯ the poor, disadvantaged and desperate ¯ who would be exploited to obtain the millions of eggs necessary to achieve human cloning.

Their fear was realized in the South Korean cloning scandal. To obtain the over 2,000 eggs, women were coerced, forced (as one junior researcher confessed, she was obligated to donate after making a mistake in the lab), and paid.  South Korea had passed a law banning payment for donating human eggs.

We must recognize that Prof. Hwang did not act alone. His work had the assistance and support of professional journals, scientists¯including American scientists who continue to advocate for human cloning¯government officials and the international media.

Women’s health and lives have been put at risk for scientific experiments, and in this case, a massive fraud.

And consider that women cannot give full consent to donate their eggs because the drug’s effects are not fully known ¯ they have not been tested or complications tabulated to quantify the extent or likelihood of complications.

The only way to ensure that women will not be taken advantage of to fill the “need” for massive numbers of eggs necessary to do cloning is to ban all forms of human cloning.

For more on cloning, read CWA’s publications click here and here.

For more on the exploitation that could arise, click here.