Welcome and thank you for joining us. I'm Kathryn Hinsch, your host this evening. Our goal tonight is to introduce you to the Women's Bioethics Project, listen to your feedback, and gain your support.
I have always been fascinated by the impact of technology on society-first while working in politics in the early '80s, then during my 12-year career at Microsoft, and most recently while pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Harvard. Technology offers great improvements in the way people work and live, but it also demands that we examine the fundamental question of what kind of society we want in the future. The rapid pace of biotechnology is quickly exceeding our ability to understand its impact and has the potential to cause unintended consequences.
Biotechnology has a profound affect on us politically, spiritually, and culturally- and it forces us to answer the tough questions: What is life? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a mother if children are born outside the womb? What implications do our genetic make-ups reveal? How does access to the new technologies differently affect people in terms of gender, race, and class? We are already grappling with many serious and wide-ranging bioethical issues involving cloning, stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, and prenatal identification of genetic disorders, just to name a few. Are we prepared?
We a developed set of questions-which are
posted around the room and in your program and on the website -to
give you a sense of what is not being asked in the broad public
debate. These issues. from stem cell research to
cosmetic surgery, all have significant impact on society in general
and women's lives specifically. They need to be addressed.
Dr. Holland will discuss the stem cell research question in more
depth later this evening, but I want to take a couple of the other
questions now and talk about what they mean. Who is harmed when women are excluded from
disease studies and clinical trials of new drugs? Everyone.
Shockingly, women have been excluded from heart disease studies
until recently. Because of that, we didn't know when women were
having heart attacks, because their symptoms and risk factors were
different than men's. Doctors didn't have the information they
needed to treat their patients, countless women did not receive the
life-saving care they needed and were left untreated, and many
died. Families suffered the loss of a mother, sister, or
daughter. The gynecological health of HIV-positive
women was also not studied until recently. It turns out, as in the
case of heart disease, women who have AIDS often present
differently from men who have AIDS; women have PID, cervical
cancer, or abdominal pain, while men often present first with
sarcoma and other symptoms. What this means is that HIV-positive
women in this country-who are often drug users, poor, and minority
women-have not received the same level of care as men. They have
not had the same access to early diagnosis, which could have made
them eligible for life-saving drugs and other support services. We cannot talk about bioethics and women
without addressing reproductive issues. For decades we have been
engaged in the pro-choice versus pro-life debate. But what does
that mean in light of biotechnological advancements? I have been a
lifelong supporter of women's reproductive freedom. That said, we
must be willing to leave our entrenched positions to engage in a
dialogue about reproductive freedom will not be easily reduced to
pro-choice or pro-life positions. For example, who decides the fate of a
frozen embryo if the parents can't agree? What if the father wants
the embryo destroyed, but the mother wants it implanted into her or
someone else's uterus? What is the pro-choice position here?
Currently, these types of decisions are being made by the courts
without the benefit of public debate. We tend to think of surrogate mothers as
someone having a baby for a friend or one who really enjoys being
pregnant and wants to give back in that way. The surrogate would be
artificially inseminated by the father's sperm, carry the child,
and then turn the child over to the couple. With assisted
reproductive technology, we can now harvest an egg from one woman,
fertilize it outside the womb, and then implant it into a surrogate
womb for gestation. Certain states don't allow women to enter into
surrogacy contracts, yet others, such as California, do. An
unintended consequence of all this is that increasingly minority
and immigrant women are serving as "host wombs" for wealthy white
couples. Is that reproductive freedom or economic exploitation? Babies can now survive outside the womb at
24 weeks, and we expect that number to decrease. What if technology
allowed us to perform an "eviction" instead of an abortion, so that
we could to safely remove fetus without destroying it and implant
it into another woman or an artificial womb? Under what
circumstances would we compel a woman to have one procedure instead
of the other? We need to be willing to think about these issues in
a completely different way than we have in the past. These are not
science-fiction scenarios. We must have the courage to tackle these
issues, ask hard questions, and be creative with our solutions. Right now there are people with different
value systems that are weighing in, framing the debate, and if we
don't get involved it is they, rather than us, who will influence
the course of public opinion. The good news is
that with bioethical issues we still have the opportunity to get
ahead of the curve. If we act quickly, we will be in a position to
anticipate rather than react to problems, and ultimately influence
the course of the next century for the good of the entire society.
The time to act is now. How are we going to do
that? We are establishing an independent, non-partisan
public-policy think tank modeled after influential organizations
such as the Brookings and Cato Institutes. This think tank, known
as the Women's Bioethics Project, will promote the thoughtful application of biotechnology to improve the
status of women's lives and seek to protect vulnerable populations
by anticipating unintended consequences, safeguarding women's
bodies from harm, and ensuring that women's life priorities are
recognized. Surprisingly, there are no
think tanks or organizations of this kind. In fact, just to give
you some perspective on think tanks in general, of the top 350
think tanks in the world-and I have directory of them right
here-there is only one that has been established to focus on the
status of women in general, let alone women and bioethics, and I
say, "Hats off to our sisters in Lithuania!" The other fact we need to
keep in mind is that a few of these think tanks and other advocacy
groups, often coming from an extremely conservative and overtly
religious point of view, have added bioethics to their public
policy agendas and are actively framing the public
debate. The WBP will fund research
and analysis to examine bioethical issues from the perspective of
women and explore the impact these issues have on society
generally, and on women's lives specifically. We will research the
issues from both a national and international
perspective. We will proactively
distribute findings through traditional and nontradional media and
reach out to opinion makers to frame the dialogue so that women's
perspectives are included in proposed policy, in media coverage,
and public debate of bioethical issues. In addition, most
bioethical debate today is currently confined to narrow slices of
academia and the medical community. Policy policy discussions often
happen without the benefit of those debates. Our
strategy is to serve as a bridge between
scholarship and policymaking. As a research institute, we
will not lobby on behalf of specific legislation. Instead, we will
work with other organizations to educate and advocate on behalf of
women on bioethical issues. For example: regarding the issue
I raised about surrogate mothers, an immigrant rights organization
might use our research to provide justification for implementing
protective legislation. To further increase our effectiveness, we
will maintain close working relationships with a
wide range of academic institutions and bioethics centers as well
as the biotech private sector and the scientific community. Yet, as
an independent think tank, we will retain the freedom to address
tough issues and advance our unique perspective. Over the next six months we will finalize
our board of directors, bioethics advisory council, and public
affairs committee. I hope many of the people in this room will
consider joining us. We will launch three kick-off projects that
you'll hear about later tonight, travel around the country to seek
corporate and foundation support, and complete our business
plan. Tonight you will hear from members of the
Women's Bioethics Project advisory board who will share their
perspectives on bioethical issues, their support for the Women's
Bioethics Project, and how you can join us in our groundbreaking
effort to launch the first bioethics think tank devoted to ensuring
women's voice and experiences are heard. Unfortunately, Dr. Wylie Burke has had a
family emergency and is unable to be with us this evening. Dr.
Burke has asked Dr. Patricia Kuszler, MD, JD, Associate Dean,
University of Washington School of Law and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medical History and
Ethics to speak on her behalf. Dean Kuszler joined the UW faculty
in 1994 to teach in and develop a Health Law program after
practicing Health Law with Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C.
Prior to pursuing a career in the law, she practiced emergency
medicine in New York and Connecticut and later served as a medical
director for Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Connecticut. Her
primary teaching and research interests include health care finance
and regulation, health insurance fraud and abuse, research
misconduct, and biotechnology and the law. Please join me in welcoming Dr.
Kuszler. Kathryn Hinsch is the founder of the Women's
Bioethics Project. She is currently enrolled in the Harvard
Divinity School, pursuing a Master's of Divinity Degree with a
focus on bioethics. Hinsch received her BA in Political Economy
from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, in 1982,
and is an alumna of the Stanford Executive Program in Palo Alto,
California. Hinsch has held numerous leadership positions in
national organizations including the Women's Political Caucus,
Business and Professional Women, and the American Association of
University Women. Hinsch was employed by Microsoft Corporation for
12 years and upon leaving was the Senior Director of Worldwide
Marketing for Windows CE.