The Law:

• A prohibition on the transfer of a human embryo produced ex vivo to a woman’s uterus for any purpose other than to attempt to produce a live-born child.

Why We Need Legislative Action:

• The prospect of initiating a pregnancy solely for research in order to develop a fetus as a source of spare parts is profoundly disturbing: it mistreats women and exploits human life.
   
• Such fetal farming is not far-fetched. Several animal studies in the past few years, particularly involving animal cloning, have shown the advantage of obtaining cells and tissues from early fetuses rather than embryos. Beyond stem cells, this research would harvest human fetuses as a source of “primordial organs.”
   
• A new law in New Jersey permits the initiation of pregnancy using cloned embryos and the development of the resulting fetus for research all the way until birth. In the guise of stopping human cloning, the law prohibits merely the “replication of a human individual by cultivating a cell with genetic material through the egg, embryo, fetal and newborn stages into a new human individual.” In reality, this explicitly permits the transfer and gestation of an embryo for research until the moment of birth. This law (and others like it proposed in other states) shows that some research advocates seek to leave open the possibility of initiating pregnancies solely to produce research materials.
   
• We must protect women from becoming laboratories or junkyards. Pregnancy is not an industrial process, and its purpose is not human experimentation or harvesting body parts but renewing human life.

What the Law Does:

• It protects women from exploitation by making sure that pregnancy is not used as a research procedure.
   
• It establishes a clear barrier to fetal farming, and to treating unborn children as mere sources of human raw material.
   
• It protects responsible assisted reproduction against degrading and deviant practices.

What the Law Does Not Do:

• It does not affect abortion law in any way.
   
• It does not affect embryo research or fetal tissue research on embryos and fetuses not created specifically for research purposes. Rather, it bans only the implantation and gestation of human embryos (and fetuses) in a woman’s womb for research.
   
• It does not affect the use of IVF for normal reproductive purposes.