Eggs for fertility treatment could one day be taken from aborted babies, scientists have said.
Israeli scientists told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, held in Madrid, that they had some preliminary success in growing egg-producing follicles taken from aborted human foetuses.
Dr Tal Biron-Shental, who presented the research yesterday, said the technique could one day be used to provide eggs for fertility treatment. About 70 baby mice have been born with the technique.
However, some experts were sceptical that aborted foetuses could ever be a practical source of human eggs, and others said they believed that even if it were technically possible, ethical concerns made it a bad idea.
The experiment, performed by Biron-Shental's group at Rabin Medical Centre near Tel Aviv and scientists at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, was designed to study the development and survival of foetal ovarian tissue.