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The Embryo Dilemma
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Friday, December 05, 2008 1:12 PM
The New York Times ran an important story on frozen embryos yesterday.
Important because it’s the first time in recent memory I can recall a secular mainstream news organization acknowledging that there is an ethical dilemma about what to do with frozen embryos. Even if it isn’t said, people who oppose embryonic stem cell research are generally treated as benighted opponents of science and reason. Here, by looking at the choices available to parents of these embryos, the Times allows us to see what the problem is in a way that may be familiar to pro-life activists, but is not well understood by the general public.
For example, the sheer number of frozen embryos “left over” from IVF procedures:
Many couples are so desperate to have a child that when eggs are fertilized in the clinic, they want to create as many embryos as possible, to maximize their chances, Dr. Lyerly said. At that time, the notion that there could be too many embryos may seem unimaginable. (In Italy, fertility clinics are not allowed to create more embryos than can be implanted in the uterus at one time, specifically to avoid the ethical quandary posed by frozen embryos.)
And the anguish people face regarding what to do with them. One woman who has 14-yr-old twins and nine frozen embryos in storage, describes her situation this way:
“There is no easy answer,” said Ms. Best, a nurse. “I can’t look at my twins and not wonder sometimes what the other nine would be like. I will keep them frozen for now. I will search in my heart.”
Later she adds that:
her nine embryos “have the potential to become beautiful people.”
The thought of giving them up for research “conjures all sorts of horrors, from Frankenstein to the Holocaust,” she said, adding that destroying them would be preferable.
Her teenage daughter favors letting another couple adopt the embryos, but, Ms. Best said, she would worry too much about “what kind of parents they were with, what kind of life they had.”
That’s interesting for all kinds of reasons: a news story allowed it to be suggested—without mocking—that ESCR might be nightmarish; the mother knows her embryos are persons; the young daughter is more pro-life (whether or not that’s how she understands herself) than her mother.
Another woman who had her embryos donated for research made this comment:
We didn’t ask many questions. We were just comfortable with the idea that they weren’t going to be destroyed. We didn’t see the point in destroying something that could be useful to science, to other people, to helping other people.”
That might seem a bit cavalier to inveterate pro-lifers, but note what else she says:
Ms. Betancourt said she wished there had been more discussion about the extra embryos early in the process. If she had known more, she said, she might have considered creating fewer embryos in the first place.
You can see from that remark she really isn’t comfortable.
What terrible burdens the culture of “choice” has laid heavily upon people’s shoulders—often without their understanding fully the consequences of their actions. As James Kushiner comments,
When a choice brings about an expected result that requires more choices, none of which are desireable, is the first choice a good choice?
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