Congress to Look at Sale of Fetal Parts
Anti-abortion groups say law being broken
-from The Cleveland Plain Dealer

WASHINGTON - The price list is macabre: Fetal eyes cost $75 apiece, pituitary glands go for $300 and brains fetch $999.  Almost as disconcerting are researchers' orders for livers, thymuses, tracheas and spleens.

Nobody quarrels with the goals of the tissue research--to find cures for the likes of Alzheimer's disease, juvenile diabetes and Parkinson's disease.  But the medical promise is running into trouble as some businesses are beginning to look at supplying fetal tissue as a money maker.

Anti-abortion activists always have opposed fetal tissue research for fear that it would encourage abortion and reduce the fetus to nothing more than a source of raw material.  They persuaded Congress in 1993 to prohibit doctors from altering abortion procedures to accommodate the demands of researchers and to allow the suppliers of fetal cells to charge only "reasonable" fees to cover the costs of cell preparation and delivery.

Now anti-abortion groups charge that the federal law is being broken.  Some doctors, they say, are altering the way they perform abortions to satisfy researchers' demands for intact body parts, and some tissue procurement companies are charging whatever the market will bear.  Miles Jones, head of an Illinois company named Opening Lines, for example, apparently sent out the price list that valued brains at $999.

"There are certainly some things that cry out for further investigation," said Douglas Johnson, national legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.  The House Commerce Committee has scheduled a hearing on the questionable practices today, and the Senate Judiciary Committee may have a hearing later this month.

All this is highly distressing to the researchers who do the work and the patients who hope desperately for cures.  "It's hard to know what unscrupulous people would do," said Lynn Fielder, vice president of medical services for a Planned Parenthood affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The Bay Area has 35 clinics, two of which allow women having abortions to donate the tissue for research.  

For Fielder, the issue is deeply personal.  At age 38, she has been coping with Parkinson's disease for seven years.  But Fielder, like Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt, believes that if there is wrong doing, those responsible should be prosecuted.  "Bad actors . . should be dealt with accordingly," Feldt said.

While fetal tissue research is hardly new - Jonas Salk relied on it in the development of the polio vaccine--scientists have only recently discovered that it can be transplanted into diseased organs and used to grow new tissue to replace that destroyed by degenerative conditions.

The National Institutes of Health spent $18.6 million last year on research projects that used fetal tissue and another $1.8 million on research involving fetal tissue transplantation.  Additional research is done by scientists using non-government funding and by pharmaceutical and biotech companies.  In treating Parkinson's, for instance, scientists at the University of Colorado have taken fetal brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical necessary to control movement, and implanted them in the brains of Parkinson's patients, whose dopamine-producing cells have been largely destroyed.  The research, still in its early stages, is particularly promising for younger patients such as Fielder.

"Those fetal cells can be transplanted into an adult person who has Parkinson's and they grow like seeds in a garden," said Curt Freed, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.  "They grow a root network that is the key to resupplying the brain with dopamine cells."

But science will take a back seat to horror stories at today's congressional hearing, which will feature a dramatic undercover report broadcast last night by the ABC news-magazine show 20/20.  The show focused on Jones, whose company appears to sell the tissue for as much as doctors and researchers are willing to pay for it.

In an undercover interview by an ABC producer in which Jones thought he was talking to an investor, he described fetal tissue procurement as a profitable product line.  When asked how much he charged for fetal liver or kidney, he replied: "It's market forces.  It's what you can sell it for."

Efforts to reach Jones for comment were not successful.

The federal law that governs fetal-tissue procurement says that it is unlawful "to knowingly" acquire, receive or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration." Violations carry fines of as much as $250,000 and 10 years in prison.

In subsequent comments on the television report, Jones also made it clear that he advocated coercing women into consenting to donate the tissue.  Little is known about the fetal tissue industry.  No government agency tracks how many fetal tissue transport companies are in business, how many abortion clinics participate in donation or how many researchers work with fetal tissue.

The Justice Department has responsibility for enforcing the criminal sections of the law but it so far has not investigated tissue transporters or prosecuted any of them, according to a spokesperson.  The NIH also has responsibility for overseeing compliance with other parts of the law but it has not done any investigations.

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