Days apart, clinics offering in vitro fertilization in Cleveland
and San Francisco had malfunctions in their storage tanks, endangering
thousands of frozen eggs and embryos.
Women's Health magazine called it a
"fertility clinic nightmare" that may deprive hundreds of women of
their chance for a child. We can all sympathize with their plight, and pray
they will find a way through their crisis.
The president of the San Francisco clinic told The Washington
Post that resulting discussions with families have been emotional. "Anger
is a big part of the phone call," he said. "We need to think: If this
tissue doesn't work, what are the next steps, and have you not feel defeated."
The clinic told news media there is still some "viable
tissue" in its tank. The clinic in Cleveland says it is investigating
which "specimens" were affected.
I don't think these families were angry about losing
"tissue" or "specimens." Some of the embryos were frozen in
the 1980s, and families kept paying hundreds of dollars a year for storage
after their reproductive years likely had passed.
When embryonic stem cell research was debated nationwide almost
two decades ago, Americans found that hundreds of thousands of embryos were in
frozen storage. Scientists and politicians said families should be encouraged
to donate the embryos for stem cell research that destroys them.
They forgot to ask: Why were so many preserved this way in the
first place? The answer is that many parents cannot bring themselves to end
their lives, or even stop paying the storage fee. They see the embryos as their
newly conceived children, not "tissue."
That insight also drove one stem cell researcher to a discovery
that may help millions. When Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Japan was considering
pursuing embryonic stem cell research, this father of two girls viewed an
embryo under a microscope at a fertility clinic.
"When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a
small difference between it and my daughters," he later told The New York
Times. "I thought, we can't keep destroying embryos for our research.
There must be another way."
He discovered how to alter ordinary adult cells to act like versatile
embryonic cells — a discovery that revolutionized medical research, winning him
a Nobel Prize in 2012. And we no longer see such fierce campaigns to destroy
embryos for their stem cells.
Why are in vitro fertilization clinic personnel blind to such
insights? Because if they saw embryos as children, they could not do their
jobs. They use eggs and sperm to produce embryos in the inhospitable
environment of a petri dish, selecting the "best" embryos for trying
to start a pregnancy.
Usually they transfer two, three or more embryos to a woman's
body, hoping that one survives. Usually none of them do. Occasionally more than
one survives, and many clinics offer "selective reduction" to
families that want one child at a time. Over 80 percent of the embryos die, and
freezing poses additional risks — even without a malfunction.
The Catholic Church warned against this approach decades before
it brought any child to birth. Pope Pius XII saw that if you depersonalize
procreation — if you divorce it from the union of embodied love between husband
and wife — you undermine respect for the resulting new life.
In vitro fertilization children are as fully human and as worthy
of respect as any of us — and that is why we need better ways than in vitro
fertilization to help families with fertility problems. The clinics' cavalier
references to "tissue" and "specimens" invite us to reflect
on the wisdom of what the church has said all along.
Doerflinger worked for 36 years in the Secretariat of
Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He writes from
Washington state.