c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Dear Speaker Pelosi:

Congratulations on your election as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. What a leap for women! Your official biography calls you Catholic. Imagine _ a Catholic woman is the most powerful woman in the world’s most powerful government!

I know you went to Catholic high school and college, and wanted to be a priest because they held the power. As you know, women still hold no power in the church. Please bring women’s sense and sensibilities to the Congress.

You are a mother and a grandmother. When you graduated from Trinity College there in Washington in 1962, did you know you would have four daughters and a son, and eventually six grandchildren? Please remember them as you wield the gavel.

Please also remember your college coursework in ethics and moral reasoning. The beginnings of your legislative marathon seem reasonable, but then you want more types of federally funded stem cell research. Of course, scientific research is a good thing, but there is a reason President Bush has held the line on embryonic stem cell research. Please take a closer look before you start sending federal money toward it.

There are two types of stem cells _ embryonic and adult. (The recent news about the “middle ground” of stem cells from amniotic fluid and placentas is not about embryonic stem cells. That research is hopeful, and might be good, but let’s concentrate on embryonic stem cells for the moment.)

Human embryonic stem cells come from human ova fertilized with human sperm to create a human embryo in a petri dish. The embryo is killed a few days later to harvest its cells. These cells are then manipulated and coaxed to form other types of cells. It hasn’t worked too well so far, but that is the objective at least.

Consider how they do it. It all begins with human ova _ human eggs _ from women. This is how they would harvest the ova of one of your daughters or granddaughters: First there are the hormone injections. These cause the woman _ perhaps your progeny _ to produce more than the usual one egg per month. In fact, the target is for 10 to 15 ova to ripen, then be aspirated, fertilized and manipulated in whatever way the scientist du jour sees fit.

That would be your genetic material floating in the dish, and your descendants who would be eviscerated at five or six days old to form what the folks who want our tax money call a “human embryonic stem cell line.”

Embryonic stem cell scientists say they want only the “spare” embryos from fertility clinics right now, but most clinic clients will not release them for research. These scientists will soon enough want more and better embryos.

Did I tell you that many fertility clinics pay for the sperm and eggs they use to create embryos for use by other people? The girls, of course, get the most for selling their genetic material. Healthy, educated young women can receive upwards of $10,000 per procedure. Your son and grandsons can sell their gametes, too. They receive much less money _ maybe $50, or $200, if they match the needed profile and provide a healthy sample. The market drives the price for embryos that are a close genetic match for their proposed recipients.

Embryonic stem cell research starts with destroying embryos. If that makes you queasy, then perhaps you might rethink your plan to spend our money making test-tube babies to be killed.

There is other research that can go forward without creating _ and destroying _ children in a dish. Amniotic stem cells are in the news these days. Amniotic stem cells come from the placenta discarded after birth, and from the amniotic fluid that surrounds the baby in the womb. Research done in Boston and in North Carolina shows that amniotic stem cells do not develop tumors the way embryonic stem cells do. Amniotic stem cells have grown to form many different types of cells _ brain, bone and muscle _ at least in mice.

But the research seems to take human cells and put them into animals. Please keep an eye on that as you consider future legislation.

There is something very dark about this brave new world of science. At the very least, Madam Speaker, please don’t try to use federal money to fund embryonic stem cell research, which at its roots truly abuses women.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of “Woman to Woman: An Anthology of Women’s Spiritualities” (Liturgical Press).)

KRE/PH END ZAGANO

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