This January, ReNeuron Group Plc announced that the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had granted permission for a Phase I clinical trial of its ReN001 stem cell therapy in the treatment of patients left disabled by an ischaemic stroke, the most common form of the condition. The trial, which involves injecting ReN001 directly into the subject's brain, is expected to start this summer at the Southern General Hospital, Glasgow.

ReN001 is derived from human aborted fetuses. A well-kept secret is that many stem cell scientists use aborted fetuses in their research. Scientists and policy makers tend to shy away from drawing the public's attention to this because abortion and aborted fetuses are political minefields. However what this means is no-one has canvassed the views of women who undergo a pregnancy termination who may be asked to agree to the fetus being used in stem cell research.

I conducted a focus group study, supported by the ESRC's Stem Cell Initiative (1), into what matters to British women when they think about donating an aborted fetus to medical research in general, and how stem cell research and therapies might influence their views (2). Here are some key findings.

Participants generally responded positively to the question, 'how would you feel about being asked to agree to the aborted fetus being used in medical research?' They said, for instance, that it might allow some good to emerge out of an unfortunate situation and that they welcomed the opportunity to help someone else. However, despite general agreement that medical research is a 'good thing', participants admitted knowing almost nothing about stem cell research.

Participants speculated on what exactly stem cell scientists might do with an aborted fetus in the laboratory: do they work with the whole fetus, its organs or its cells?  Would it be 'poked about with', 'pulled apart', 'chopped up', or 'get drawn from?';  Would the fetus serve as a research subject, that is, would it be 'alive whilst it was being experimented on'; is it treated as an organ donor, and if so, do investigators resuscitate them or use life-support equipment to maintain their vital functions until their organs are harvested; would 'the essence of the fetus' be extracted from it?

The language of stem cell research creates confusion between 'life' at the cellular level and 'life' of a conscious human being. As one participant succinctly put it, 'you don't think of a fetus as just a bunch of human cells because, you know, it's embedded in your kind of knowledge and your culture as to what a fetus can become'.

Several participants thought stem cells might have something to do with growth. However 'growing' suggested that stem cell research somehow allows the aborted fetus a biographical existence beyond the abortion, that scientists might even develop or resurrect it. This idea flies in the face of the reason why women seek an abortion which is to make them 'baby free' and not to provide research material for investigators. Where the aborted fetus somehow persists beyond the abortion there is a danger that 'it's still haunting you' and that it might prevent a woman from 'getting on with her life' and coming to terms with the abortion.

The purpose of elected abortion is to separate irrevocably woman and fetus. However, while physical separation might be complete, some participants said an attachment of sorts persisted. As one participant put it: 'It's strange 'cause my initial reaction was, well, there's no way I'd do anything to my aborted fetus. You'd have that ownership thing even though you're aborting it, you still have, they kind of, oh but it's still mine, and I thought what a weird thing, to say.'

'That ownership thing' stands for the duty of care and its associated responsibilities that babies can provoke in women and which involves ensuring the baby's physical and emotional well being. Other body parts such as a kidney do not elicit this response. Hence, in light of their ignorance about what stem cell scientists do to or with aborted fetuses, participants began to express reluctance to agree to their being used for research. As one participant explained, 'cause it's yours and you're gonna feel like you've done, you're doing it wrong anyway, probably, and then what's gonna happen once it goes?'.

Participants also evinced an ethical responsibility to society in general. There were nods and expressions of agreement when one participant explained, 'That's what would bother me, that the potential lack of control that you could end up with a situation that you had helped to create.' In conclusion the research revealed an invitation to donate an aborted fetus to stem cell research places a woman at the juncture of a host of concerns over which she has no authority.