Judge's ruling frozen embryos must be destroyed called 'tragic case'

IMAGE: CNS photo/Waltraud Grubitzsch, EPA

By Liz O’Connor

LEVITTOWN,
Pa. (CNS) — A California state judge’s ruling that a now-divorced couple’s five
frozen embryos must be destroyed is an example of doing something that
technology allows without considering all its aspects, according to medical ethicists.

Christopher
White, director of research and education for the California-based Center for
Bioethics and Culture, called the dispute a “tragic case”
illustrating “the plight of these frozen embryos.”

Estimates
of the number of embryos in frozen storage range from “hundreds of
thousands” to several million worldwide. White told Catholic News Service he
would be comfortable putting the number at 1 million.

The
center is opposed to the destruction of the embryos created by in vitro
fertilization for anesthesiologist Mimi Lee and Stephen Findley, when they
married. They are now divorced.

The
couple had signed a release at the time directing that the embryos should be
destroyed if they were to divorce. But Lee said she did not understand the
agreement to be binding and thought she could change her mind.

California
Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo in San Francisco ruled Nov. 18 the
embryos must be thawed and discarded.

According
to articles in the Los Angeles Times, Lee was diagnosed with breast cancer days
before the couple’s 2010 wedding, and they decided to create embryos through
IVF before she underwent treatment that might impair her fertility. She and
Findley separated in 2013 and divorced earlier this year.

Lee,
46, asserts that the embryos represent her last chance to have a biological
child; Findley does not want to have children with her. Lee’s lawyer did not
return a CNS request for comment, but Lee is reported to have said she would appeal a ruling
against her.

Massullo’s
ruling is in line with most other rulings on the subject across the country,
according to a Nov. 19 article in The New York Times. Judges in at least 11
states have ruled in estranged couples’ embryo-custody cases, and in at least
eight of those states the ruling has been in favor of the party who did not
want the unborn babies brought to term.

In
Pennsylvania, Illinois and Maryland, however, courts have awarded the
embryos to women who argued, as Lee does, that the embryos created with
ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends represent their only chance to have biological
children. There is no federal law regulating these issues.

Father
Tad Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Center for
Bioethics in Philadelphia, said that “it is objectively contrary to human
dignity to bring our children into the world in laboratory glassware; they have
the right to be conceived exclusively within the marital embrace. Those who are
involved in pursuing or promoting IVF invariably act in a disordered and
morally unacceptable manner, despite the loftiest of intentions.”

Fertility
specialists in the U.S. regularly create numerous embryos using IVF and insert
several at a time into the mother’s body, in the hope that one or two will successfully
implant in the womb and come to term. Remaining embryos are stored in case the
attempt is a failure or more children are desired in the future.

White,
of the Center
for Bioethics and Culture, said that IVF has an 80 percent failure rate for
each attempt worldwide and that the failure rate is 70 percent in the U.S.

He
noted that Germany has a law that only three eggs at a time may be inseminated and
all must be inserted — Father Pacholczyk wrote in his syndicated bioethics column
that Italy has a similar law — and these countries therefore do not have the
problem of what to do with stored frozen embryos.

Father
Pacholczyk said that several alternatives to the destruction of unwanted frozen
embryos have been suggested, including donation for scientific research, donation
of the frozen embryo for adoption by a woman who wishes to have a child, or
indefinite preservation of the embryo in the frozen state.

The
church, Father Pacholczyk said, has no position on frozen embryos, although a
2008 statement by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Dignitas
Personae” (“The Dignity of a Person”) comes down firmly on the
side of the dignity and worth of the human embryo.

“It
needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a
situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved,” it says. Among
the document’s conclusions are that the embryos may not be used for research
and may not be used as “a treatment for infertility” which latter the
bioethicist said could seem to rule out the adoption alternative.

Father
Pacholczyk told CNS that his own opinion is that only continued preservation of
the embryo would be allowable.

In
his syndicated column, he has written that frozen-storage facilities are
analogous to orphanages, and the fee that parents pay to continue to keep the
embryos there is not unlike the money parents spend to care for children who
have been born. The embryos could be kept until they die and then be buried,
rather than being disposed of as medical waste.

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