by Bishop John R. Gaydos, Diocese of Jefferson City, Missouri

For three generations, my family made their home and grew up on the near south side of the city of St. Louis. Consequently it was just a short bus ride to the rich and intriguing world of what was downtown when I was growing up.

For one thing, downtown seemed to be the largest single destination in the area for people going to work. It was the site of large banks, office buildings, department and specialty stores and first-run movie houses. And in the days before the Gateway Arch, the area along the river held old warehouses and fleabag hotels that offered meager shelter to people (mostly men) with no jobs and an unquenchable thirst for cheap wine and booze. They, too, were part of the downtown mix.

A couple of blocks up from the river on Market Street were two institutions that offered diametrically opposed options to those down-and-out on their “luck”: Right next door to each other sat the Sunshine Mission and the 9-0-5 Liquor store. Anyone with that “thirst,” no money and not yet ready to hand things over to God, could walk over a few more blocks to a grim looking blood bank that would give money in return for a pint of blood of dubious quality. To a young boy in grade school and high school, observing the scene from a public bus window on the way to and from a downtown department store, it was a sad and pathetic sight, and a cautionary tale to boot of where one could end up if not careful.

That marginal market in human blood would of course be one of the first images that would come to my mind when I try to imagine our future should the advocates of uncontrolled embryonic stem cell research and somatic cell nuclear transfer (yes, it really is human cloning) have their way and get their constitutional amendment enshrined in Missouri. The occasion for the haunting image is the prospect for all of those human eggs that will be needed to conduct this Orwellian research. Poor marginalized women in our country and around the world will have a new way to be exploited as they succumb to an invasive procedure to provide their eggs for some money.

Imagine my surprise when I found that media types already seem to be trying to assure us that the human-egg industry can be a good and charming thing. Earlier this month, there it was on the “Today” show. I believe the segment was called “Egg U.” — as in “University.” She was sitting between the “Today” show host and a biologist: an attractive, wholesome-looking coed, extolling the advantages she has realized in making ends meet in college by selling her eggs.

I know that college students, out-of-work actors and breadwinners temporarily short of cash for the rent do from time to time resort to the commercial blood banks. But this type of situation says more about the hard edge of modern society than about an enlightened way to help people balance their budget in a creative way.

Needless to say, the upbeat report on the entrepreneurial opportunity of the human egg market did not convince me to abandon my earlier image of the whole scheme. And I hope that those who will be most in danger of exploitation don’t fall for the trick either.

One more observation about this whole sad scenario: Researchers seem ready enough to admit that the whole area of human embryonic stem cell research would not see any concrete results for maybe 50 or 60 years. In the meantime, millions and millions of tax dollars that could be applied to concrete public health programs such as Medicaid would be diverted to an area of medical research in which there is no way we can anticipate a necessarily successful outcome.

And one can only wonder in what century any new discoveries could be economically affordable in the poorer sectors of society. After all, in these days when organ transplantation is almost routine in our country, it is still a rarity and out of reach to most people in the Third World.