Research abandoned on contraceptive vaccine to ‘immunize’ women against pregnancy

Washington D.C., Dec 1, 2009 / 16:15 pm

A leading contraceptive researcher has abandoned her attempts to create a vaccine that would render a woman “immune” from pregnancy. The Population Research Institute lauded the end of the research, which it said tried to make a woman’s body treat pregnancy as a disease.

Based on research into women who are infertile because of antibodies that inhibit sperm from fertilizing the egg, Dr. Donnie Dunbar had hoped to develop a vaccine that would trick a healthy woman’s immune system into a hostile reaction to her own eggs. She intended the vaccine to help combat what she saw as the “world population problem.”

Tests which injected rabbits with pig proteins caused an autoimmune response, but it completely destroyed the ovaries.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t just looking at preventing fertilization now; we generated a complete autoimmune disease, which is also known as premature ovarian failure,” Dunbar said, according to the Population Research Institute.

“I am responsible for killing this vaccine for further human research, and I made some people in my biotech company and some other people very unhappy.”

The Population Research Institute (PRI) described her vaccine as “an insidious attempt to make the body treat pregnancy as a disease.” However, the organization said her refusal to develop the vaccine for humans showed “an integrity often absent among anti-fertility researchers.”

The former contraceptive vaccine is now being developed for possible use as a sterilizing agent for dogs and cats and for the culling of the African elephant population.