What British women say matters to them about donating an aborted fetus to stem cell research: a focus group study

This is the first investigation into what matters to British women when they think about donating an aborted fetus to research, and how stem cell research and therapies might influence their views. Tissue derived from the aborted fetus is considered "the right tool for the job" in some stem cell laboratories. Research using tissue derived from aborted fetuses is permitted in Britain, while deliberate abortion to provide fetal tissue for research is illegal. Investigators are advised to seek women's agreement to donate the fetus after they have signed the consent form for the abortion, and stem cell researchers seek fetuses aborted under the 'social' grounds of the Abortion Act 1967. This research was based on focus groups with women who had both had a termination and had not had a termination. It found that initial enthusiasm for the donation of the aborted fetus for medical research, which was understood as a good thing, diminished as participants gained information and thought more carefully about the implications of such a decision. Lack of knowledge about how aborted fetuses are treated as scientific objects in the stem cell laboratory provoked concerns about mishandling, and invoked in some participants what we have called the duty of care which women feel towards babies and children. The duty of care might apply to other research using aborted fetuses. But what makes stem cell research more troubling is its association with renewal, regeneration, and immortality which participants understood as somehow reinstating and even developing the fetus' physical existence and social biography, the very thing abortion is meant to eliminate. By the end of the focus groups, participants had co-produced a tendency to refuse to donate aborted fetuses.