Brave New Frozen World (Part 2 of 4)

Brave New Frozen World (Part 2 of 4)
Thursday, November 7, 2024 by Christine

PRE EMBRYO, NO SUCH WORD

In a major embryo custody dispute between a couple in Tennessee, the American Fertility Society attempted to distinguish frozen embryos from actual “persons” by classifying them as “pre embryos.” In powerful court testimony, one Dr. Jerome Lejeune, the world renowned specialist in the field of Human Genetics stated that “each human being has a unique beginning which occurs at the moment of conception.” He asserted there was no such word as pre embryo, given that before the embryo nothing is known to exist aside from sperm and egg. The court overwhelmingly agreed with Dr. Lejeune.

EXPERIMENTATION

So does biochemist, professor and author Lawrence Roberge. Roberge says that the term pre embryo is “fraudulent.” Yet it is this deceptive terminology which may in part be responsible for the cavalier disregard of frozen embryos as sub-human, relegating them to the ranks of tissue used in research experiments. When the courts rule that frozen embryos must be donated for these purposes to settle custody disputes, Roberge’s concern is that some of them can be used for “horrible experiments.”

EXAMPLE

One illustration he offers involves that of a woman whose father suffered with Alzheimer’s Disease, a progressively debilitating deterioration of the brain. The woman, aware that fetal tissue research has shown that fetal brain cells have been used with varying degrees of success to treat this disease, approached her doctor with this knowledge in mind. She asked the doctor to perform IVF using her eggs and her father’s sperm to impregnate her with a fetus that she planned to abort so that its brain cells could be used to treat her father’s illness. Roberge says the doctor refused, but what if he hadn’t? What about the doctors who can be financially motivated to abuse their power in creating life with the sole purpose to destroy that life?

PLAYING GOD

Combined with what we already know scientifically, if we could determine that frozen embryos contain spirit or a soul, determining whether they live or die would be just like playing God. If we fully realized that we cannot know when the spirit enters the body, we would not want to risk discarding God’s Spirit within the life that man begins in the laboratory. God Himself tells us, “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the spirit enters the body being formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand God, the Maker of all things”(Ecclesiastes 11:5).

ETHICAL DILEMMA

We may leave weather radar to the meteorologists, but do we want to relinquish the identification of spirit to those whose discernment lacks the involvement of the soul? One author says that “from the pragmatic perspective, the warning about ‘playing God’ is a distracting irrelevance, since we’re already playing God in so many ways.” He cites Nobel sperm banks and preconception sex selection with success rates of some ninety percent as examples. For the Christian couple suffering the very real despair of infertility, this ethical debate should be taken seriously in addition to the practical concerns regarding Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART).

EMBRYO FREEZING

We began freezing embryos as part of the costly ART known as In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Using a series of painful hormone injections, a woman’s ovaries are stimulated to produce multiple eggs; up to twenty or more. The eggs are then harvested during a surgical procedure known as oocyte retrieval, immediately fertilized and become embryos. Because initial (and often subsequent) implantations may fail, some embryos will be implanted, while others will be frozen as back ups for future attempts. Depending on the initial success and also possible future changes in a couple’s decision to pursue IVF, excess embryos are routinely ordered destroyed by couples themselves, or donated to research, which of course also leads to their ultimate destruction.

EGG FREEZING

We then began attempts to freeze eggs, hopeful to some as an achievement that would bypass certain ethical dilemmas associated with embryo freezing. Eggs have always been considered too fragile to freeze, yet with persistence a success was lauded when a Georgia woman was the first to give birth this way in this country. In this case, after sixteen of the woman’s twenty-three eggs survived the thawing process and were fertilized at the same time, eleven of them developed into viable embryos. Since eleven is a number usually more than twice the amount a doctor will implant in a woman at one time, four were used for implantation, resulting in the birth of twins. Yet what is neglected to be mentioned in coverage of this story is that of the whereabouts of the remaining seven embryos. Until technology of egg freezing is perfected, embryo freezing is still the preferred method for IVF. And yet, even if it could “pass the muster,” which Scientific American asserts it may never do, should we simply overlook these millions of frozen embryos globally we must deal with at present?

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