Giving Life, Receiving Life

Talk about interesting, intriguing coincidences! As is my habit I was skimming over a number of sites this morning and ran across an article that offered a fine overview of the case that induced abortion is strongly associated with an increase in breast cancer.

For those of you who read National Right to Life News (subscriptions available by calling 202-626-8828), this news is old hat. Dr. Joel Brind has brilliantly laid out the whys and wherefores that explain why women who abort multiply their likelihood of coming down with breast cancer.

Well, no sooner had I read that column out of Seattle than I bumped into a fascinating, first-of-its-kind story out of Canada. And what a story it is!

Last year, Patrizia Durante, now 27, learned she was suffering from acute myloid leukemia when she was 2/3rds of the way through her first pregnancy. She told the Gazette in a story that appeared last weekend,

"It was terrifying," she recalled. "I was afraid for the baby. I was afraid of dying and not being there for my daughter. It was very stressful and difficult for my family."

When she did not respond to moderate doses of chemotherapy, the doctors induced labor at 26 weeks so they could crank up the dosage without hurting her baby. On Sept. 2, 2001, Victoria was born. Weighing three-and-a-half pounds and two months premature baby Victoria was placed in an incubator while Mrs. Durante renewed her chemotherapy.

By March, however, Mrs. Durante was so ill that doctors at Royal Victoria Hospital could wait no longer for a suitable donor for a bone-marrow transplant. At that point doctors took a calculated risk.

They infused Mrs. Durante with Victoria's umbilical-cord blood, which had been frozen. (According to the Gazette, “umbilical-cord blood is usually banked for later use by the child should it develop a life-threatening illness such as leukemia.”)

While clearly Mrs. Durante's body might have rejected the blood (because Victoria’s blood was only a half-match; it carried her mother's genes as well as her father's), this might work to Mrs. Durante’s benefit. As Dr. Pierre Laneuville, director of hematology at the McGill University Health Centre, told the Gazette,

“[I]n this case, the incompatibility -- that is, the genes that the baby's dad contributed -- theoretically could have been very beneficial in this transplant…There was the possibility that the immune system of the baby may identify the leukemia as foreign and attack.” Which is exactly what happened.

As the Gazette described it,

“The stem cells also flooded Mrs. Durante's bloodstream and stuck to her bone marrow -- the part of the body that manufactures the blood -- and began rebuilding her blood system.”

The stem cells also destroyed residual cancer cells, and seven months after the infusion Mrs. Durante is in complete remission.

"We're elated," Dr. Laneuville told the Gazette. "This is the best-case scenario we could possibly have imagined.... From a doctor's point of view, the chances are she's cured."

As discussed in Today’s News & Views and in NRL News, what makes umbilical cord blood so useful is that it is plentiful in the kind of stem cells (hemopoietic stem cells) that can rebuild a blood system that has taken a beating from mega-doses of chemotherapy. Preliminary results from animal studies to determine whether stem cells derived from cord blood can repair damaged heart and brain tissue are “promising,” the newspaper also reported.

In Mrs. Durante’s lovely words, "I gave my daughter life, and then she gave mine back." She told the Gazette while cradling Victoria, "It's a miracle. She was meant to be born to save me."

For pro-lifers, who’ve argued ceaselessly that there are morally unobjectionable alternatives to lethally extracting stem cells from human embryos, one of Dr. Laneuville’s concluding observations is especially poignant:

"We are now in an era where we are realizing scientifically and medically that we have sources of stem cells that can become other tissues and can be used therapeutically," he said. "And the most accessible source and the one we're throwing in the garbage all the time are these cord cells."

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

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