In the News
Donna is doing appearances about Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood (publication date, April 24th) at the Oxford Sunday Times Literary Festival (4th April 2008) and at the Edinburgh Literary Festival (August 2008, date to be fixed). In addition Donna is doing a publicity tour in New York City on 18th-19th June.
On Thursday June 12 Donna will be speaking about Body Shopping at the Dana Centre of the Science Museum in South Kensington, between 7-9 pm. Please contact Kirsty.Roach@Science.Museum.org.uk
Donna published a guest column in The Sunday Times on April 20th, under the title 'Unseen rise of Body shopping'. In it she criticised the way in which the 'God versus science' debate has become a dangerous distraction during the Parliamentary debate on the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. 'As a (secular) bioethicist who also sits on ethics committees,' she wrote, 'I find it supremely unhelpful to be labelled either a luddite or a God-botherer when I pose ethical questions about scientific developments.' To read the whole article, click here>>
Donna appeared on Radio Four 'Woman's Hour' (Feb. 19th), discussing the case of a woman who had donated eggs to her own daughter, who would otherwise be infertile when she grows up, as a result of a genetic condition.
Donna made front-page news in The Observer on February 18th 2007, with her comments on the decision by Britain's regulatory authority to allow women to 'donate' eggs for stem cell research, despite the manifest medical risks and the possibility that women from poorer countries will be tempted by the £250 offered as 'expenses'. Her comments were also picked up in Le Monde on February 22nd and she was interviewed on both Radio Four Woman's Hour and Germany national public television.
Earlier in February 2007, The Guardian published a letter from Donna on Virgin's entry into cord blood banking for the stem cell technologies. Richard Branson had claimed that there were no ethical problems in cord blood banking, but Donna's letter clarified the risks to women from the process, as against the very speculative benefits for their babies. If the risks are being downplayed and the benefits overplayed in order to make profits for private firms like Virgin, then that's an ethical problem. She also pointed out that although the Virgin bank will make part of the cord blood available for public use, women who want to donate altruistically have already been doing so for ten years through the National Health Service cord blood bank--without having to pay £1500 for the privilege!
And during this busy month, she also found time to reply to a request from the Daily Mail for an answer to a question posed in a feature article interviewing prominent women in public life-- 'what do women want today?' Her answer was pithy: 'What women want today is no different from what they've always wanted: not to be treated as objects-- of the tissue trade, of sex trafficking, of condescension. Just to be considered fully human subjects. Simple, really.'