A medical expert, Dr Philip Njemanze, on Friday in Lagos urged President Goodluck Jonathan not to sign into law the new National Health Bill because it would legitimise trade in human embryos.
Njemanze said in an interview that Section 51 of the Bill which states that “no person shall, without the permission of the minister, export and import human embryos and zygotes’’ actually legitimised trade in human beings.
Njemanze, who is the Chairman of General and Private Medical Practitioners of Nigeria, said that embryos are full human beings which should not be items of trade.
Njemanze said that the Bill if passed would make it possible for Nigerian women to go for intro-fertilisation in IVF clinics where their eggs would illegitimately be exported for sale in the international market.
“When they sell these eggs at the international market, the buyers fertilise them and they become embryos thus making them full-fledged Nigerians.”
According to him, these embryos would then be used for embryonic stem cell research and “these Nigerians” would later be killed in the laboratories.
Njemanze said that the act of selling women’s eggs, which had been banned in Europe, was being rerouted to Nigeria through the sponsorship of the National Health Bill.
According to Njemanze, the Western countries required about 100 million of such embryos annually for experiment, warning that the aggressive egg collection campaign in Nigeria would result in the death of many Nigerian women.
“They now want to come to Nigeria when they have banned it in their country, they want to come here and fund some people to establish clinics where they will be paying poor women N45, 000 to collect their eggs.
“The implication is that four years later, many of these women will develop major health problems and some of them will die of kidney failure, liver failure, cancers and other diseases.
“That is why they are funding the National Health Bill and some of its clauses have no place in the Bill.”
He called on the media to educate Nigerians on health issues to save Nigerians from such dangers.
