Giving Birth For Stem Cells

Web produced by: Kerry Duke

By Tom Kisken
Scripps Howard News Service

Maria and Rick Kent want to do all they can to save their 23-month-old daughter from leukemia.

That desire is propelling the Simi Valley, Calif., couple down an intricate and controversial path. They plan on having another child to increase the chances that Hailey Joy will be able to find a match if she needs a second stem cell transplant.

Because Maria had nine miscarriages in about as many years, her fertilized eggs will be implanted into a surrogate who is donating her time and womb.

In the best scenario, the baby will be born and the stem cells that were transplanted into Hailey a year ago will continue to protect her from acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Hailey's doctors at Children's Hospital Los Angeles said it's too early to talk about a second transplant. But chances of a relapse are high, and if that happens, Maria said, stem cells could be taken from the baby's preserved umbilical cord blood or the cells could be extracted from bone marrow. Hailey could get a transplant and a second chance.

"This opportunity fell into my lap," said Maria. "If I didn't do it and she relapsed, I couldn't live with myself."

Giving birth to make stem cells, bone marrow or organs available for transplants is rare but happens enough that it has earned a label: savior siblings. The debate over whether someone else's need justifies birth touches on the value of life, compassion, medical technology and religion.

The Kents said they want a bigger family and that they will love and care for the new baby exactly the same as their other three children: 22-year-old Heather and twins Ryan and Hailey.

They say a surrogacy agency that is donating its services is trying to raise $15,000 to defray other costs that must be paid to make the birth possible. Given that twins Ryan and Hailey were carried by a surrogate, they say their decision to pursue another surrogacy was easy to make.

"Pretty much any parent would do it to save their child," said Rick.

Ryan is healthy, but when Hailey was about 3 months old, she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that made her white blood cells mutate and grow uncontrollably, shoving aside the healthy cells.

She needed a stem cell transplant. Neither her siblings nor her parents had matching tissue types, but a partial match was found through a depleted national registry. Intense chemotherapy was used to wipe out the cancerous blood cells and with it much of Hailey's immune system. Stem cells from an umbilical cord were transplanted to act like seeds and grow healthy blood cells.

Specialists have told the family that Hailey has about a 25 percent chance of living more than five years.

"The kind of cancer she has most kids don't survive," said Maria.

But the owners of the Surrogacy Options agency in Maryland and Illinois had read about Hailey. They wanted to find the Kents a surrogate parent, and they wanted to do it for free.

A 34-year-old homemaker from Texas named Misty was selected by the Kents from a list provided by the agency. "She said she felt like she was called to do this for them," said Jamie Aidis, co-owner of the agency.

Before they're implanted, embryos from the Kents will be analyzed by a geneticist in a Michigan lab to make sure the bone marrow matches Hailey's as closely as possible. The Kents want only one embryo implanted, but two could be used to increase the odds of a pregnancy, meaning there's a chance for multiple births or none at all.

"In a given cycle, you could say conservatively that there's at least a 70 percent chance it won't work," said Dr. Rick Buyalos, the Thousand Oaks fertility specialist who is donating his time to do the in-vitro work. Despite the odds, he thinks the surrogate birth is worth trying.

"It gives a chance for Hailey to have a normal life expectancy," Buyalos said.

But the process turns babies into commodities used because they have blood or tissue that can help others, said the Rev. Richard Benson, Catholic bioethicist at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, Calif.

He worries that using birth to save someone's life implies the person in need is more important than the baby being born. He said the donor has no way to give consent for a transplant.

The use of a surrogate is another barrier, twisting the natural process of giving birth into manufacturing babies, Benson said.

"Sincerity and a desire to love doesn't remove the ethical boundaries," he said.

Tom Kisken is a reporter for the Ventura County Star.