Word: fetal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Right-to-Lifers have latched onto this argument as a principal weapon in their war to overturn Roe v. Wade. Given the uncertainty of the viability standard, they claim, potential life should be recognized from conception. They point to medical technologies such as sonography and fetal-heart monitoring that have literally raised the visibility of the unborn well before viability. "It's now common for young couples to see their ((unborn)) little baby moving around, sucking his thumb," says John Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee...
...with many rights, but puts a good number of restraints on her. She agrees to abstain from smoking, alcohol and drugs as well as sexual intercourse during the period around insemination. Most agreements forbid her to abort without consent of the father, though some require it if amniocentesis reveals fetal abnormalities. And while the mothers are screened, though not always with sufficient diligence, the contracting couples often are not. What are the ethical dilemmas of a surrogate mother who delivers her child into a home she knows little about...
...implant fetal cells into adults? Fetal cells, Gale explains, are "immunologically naive": during the early stages of pregnancy, they have not yet developed all the antigens, or distinctive surface proteins, that allow the recipient's immune system to identify and reject them. Another advantage of fetal cells is that they are generally not mature enough to cause graft-vs.-host disease, which can occur when the tissues of a transplant recipient are attacked by implanted adult cells. Also, fetal nerve cells, unlike adult cells, can regenerate and thus have the potential to repair a damaged brain or spinal cord. "These...
...uses of fetal-cell surgery, the most successful to date has been the treatment of Type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes. This disease, which afflicts about a million Americans, results from the gradual destruction of small islets of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Without insulin, the body cannot convert sugars into energy. Even with careful diet and daily doses of insulin, Type 1 diabetes can eventually lead to blindness, kidney failure and strokes...
Past attempts to implant fetal islet cells failed because a small percentage of these cells have antigenic markers that trigger an immune response. "The classic view was that since these antigens were genetically controlled, there was no way to remove them from the cell," says Kevin Lafferty, an Australian-born immunologist who is director of research at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Denver. In 1980, however, Lafferty discovered that culturing islet cells in an oxygen-rich environment for a couple of weeks kills those that bear trigger antigens. Says Calvin Stiller, an immunologist at the University...