Tom Harkin: “As the Senator knows, in S. 5, we have very strict ethical guidelines. One, the only embryos that can be used are those…”

“As the Senator knows, in S. 5, we have very strict ethical guidelines. One, the only embryos that can be used are those slated to be discarded anyway from our IVF clinics. Secondly, there has to be written informed consent by the donors. And, third, there cannot be any monetary or other kinds of inducements at all to the donors of these embryos. Those guidelines are actually stricter than what is in law right now. The other point the Senator brought up, if she has a minute for me to explore this point with her a bit, is that we have in vitro fertilization clinics. My information is that last year about 50,000 babies were born by IVF. I have friends of mine who had children thanks to IVF; otherwise, they would never have had children. Obviously, there are some embryos left over. They would like to be able to donate those for embryonic stem cell research because they are not going to have any more children. So it seems to me the ethics question is, are we just going to discard them as hospital waste, which is done every day, or would it be more ethical to say let's use those with the strict guidelines we have to save lives, to make life better, to ease suffering and pain?”