TAKE ACTION NOW and tell your legislators to OPPOSE House Bill 1448 and reject inhumane research on embryonic human beings in Maryland.

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HB 1448-   Animal Testing and Research – Alternative Nonanimal Test Methods, seeks to prohibit animal testing by commercial research laboratories.  Unfortunately, the bill fails to recognize living embryonic humans as animals, much less as human beings and targets their lives for destruction. 

Human beings in our embryonic stage of life deserve dignity and protection under the law that is equal to or greater than the protections afforded to non-human animals. While laws to prevent animal cruelty may be humane, they should not be enacted at the expense of innocent human lives.

This bill would require commercial research labs to use unethical in vitro testing on embryonic human beings as a preferred alternative to testing on non-human animals in developing household and cosmetic products.  This would create an artificial demand for human embryos for commercial research and incentivize the buying, selling and destruction of living embryonic human beings as mere commodities.

Human ova (eggs) and stem cells are highly valuable.  Embryonic testing can involve financial inducement for mass embryo harvesting from human hosts, typically young women of childbearing age whose future fertility is put at risk by these procedures.  Commercial uses of human embryos have spawned an underground network of human trafficking, exploiting women as human ovum (egg) “mules”, and removing their rights as mothers, not unlike the story of "The Handmaid's Tale".  

The demand for in vitro testing on human embryos also incentivizes labs to take advantage of vulnerable couples who are attempting to conceive by In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), by maturing and harvesting excessive numbers of human embryos and convincing parents to dispose of or donate unused embryos.  IVF labs often use genetic testing which results in a high prevalence of misdiagnosis of embryonic abnormalities.  This bill would create a financial incentive for labs to misdiagnose embryos as non-viable and to induce parents to discard of embryonic children who can then be sold and destroyed for research purposes.

For these reasons we strongly oppose House Bill 1448 and urge the Maryland General Assembly to reject this inhumane bill.  Human beings deserve respect and dignity at all stages of life.