Brian Caulfield

They rest at temperatures approaching absolute zero, in a state of suspended animation. Conceived in a manner inconceivable in our fathers’ youth, they are truly sui generis, the in vitro product of disembodied male and female gametes, the offspring of partners who may never even have met. 

By the law of the land, they are “potential life”; yet their potential to improve lives makes their destruction valuable. In a culture obsessed with self, they are afforded no identity and treated in terms of what they can do for others.

Small beyond seeing with the unaided eye, they are frozen embryos, confined to a dark, absurd world of liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation. They are prevented from doing what comes naturally to their kind—divide and grow. If left in the frozen state, they will expire after a decade or so. Yet they are considered by many to be miraculous, even “magical,” in the potential of their stem cells for curing diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. Thus these beings rest at the center of a firestorm of controversy that has divided political alliances and brought forth cries for research at any cost from Hollywood’s beautiful people who would ever remain that way.

Even usually clear minds have gone fuzzy on the issue. In his New York Times political column, William Safire, the culture’s language arbiter, commits a sin of imprecision while pushing for federal funding of stem-cell research (“Stem Cell Hard Sell,” July 5). In the style of the political flack he once was, Safire writes, “The most flexible and versatile stem cells appear to be those taken from excess blastocysts (groupings of under 30 cells just becoming embryos) created in the laboratory for infertile couples, frozen and scheduled to be discarded.”

Safire’s biology is fatally wrong. If he doesn’t have a current medical textbook at hand, a recent Webster’s will do well enough: a blastocyst (or blastula) is “an embryo at the stage of development in which it consists of one or several layers of cells around a central cavity, forming a hollow sphere.” Blastocysts, the language maven ought to know, are not “just becoming embryos,” they are embryos.  

Reading further into his imprecision, we have to ask: Does Safire actually believe that the “most flexible and versatile” stem cells “appear to be” only those taken from “excess blastocysts . . . scheduled to be discarded”? Surely not. He presumably knows that a fresh embryo due to be implanted in a womb would have the same properties. And he does concede that there is this hitch: The “doomed blastocysts, which have never been inside a person, are potential people, however remote that potential.”

By now he expects the reader to say, “What’s a potential-person, becoming-an-embryo, doomed blastocyst compared with born persons seeking cures for debilitating diseases that are causing them agony and their loved ones untold emotional suffering?”

Safire finishes with an appeal to an “ethical philosophy,” summed up as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” This utilitarian creed begs the question. Those who oppose embryo research do so precisely because they claim that killing embryos is a manifest evil, and that you may never do evil so that good will follow for however many.

William Safire is not the only high-placed voice favoring the dismemberment of embryos. Legislators known to be pro-life have joined the chorus, saying that killing these young ones to save the lives of older ones is the truly “pro-life” thing to do. The issue of federal funding will be decided by the time you read this, but the truth of the matter still must be set out.

Indeed, there are many in our society who see these hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos for who they are and seek to give them a chance at normal life by “adopting” them into the womb. When thousands of frozen embryos were slated for destruction in England a few years back, a number of women offered to become their mothers. A California company, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, specializes in making such matches through its Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program.1

Yet these adoptions themselves raise moral questions which are hinted at by the statement of a “Snowflakes Adoptive Mother” on the company’s website: “It’s an incredible concept that I am both birth mother and adopting mother . . . What an awesome story we’ll have to tell our children—that God let one family start them and another family complete them.”

The two-mothers concept gives some ethical experts pause. If you accept that the normal moral way for a woman to become pregnant is through relations with her husband, does defrosting an already-conceived embryo and implanting him or her in a woman’s womb violate natural law? Is it a perversion of the marital act that involves a woman, however well intentioned, in grave immorality?

These are some of the questions that have divided medical ethicists and moral theologians who agree on almost every other issue regarding human life. The moral experts I am referring to all agree that life begins at fertilization and must be protected at every stage till natural death, and that the thousands of frozen embryos worldwide have identity, dignity, and an inherent right to life. They agree that living beings may not be disposed of, yet they disagree over where and how these embryos may be placed to live out however many days God grants them.

Regulars to these pages find themselves on different sides of the question. Msgr. William Smith, a professor of moral theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, bases his reasoning on the Catholic Church’s definitive document on bioethics, Donum vitae, published in 1987. Msgr. Smith says that there is no moral way to implant a frozen embryo into a woman’s womb and that therefore, unfortunately, the embryos must be allowed to expire naturally in their unnatural state. Dr. William May, professor of moral theology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C., draws from the same Catholic tradition to conclude that it is permissible for a willing woman to give an embryo the only chance it has at being born into the world. Dr. May says that even single women may engage in this activity and give the babies up for more traditional adoption after birth.

In coming to their opposing conclusions, these two experts define differently the moral object (what is freely chosen by the person acting). Msgr. Smith maintains that “adopting” an embryo amounts to a form of high-tech surrogate motherhood, which distorts natural sexual and family relations. A woman’s choosing to become a biological mother in the sense of being pregnant with the child cannot change the fact that she is not the biological mother in the genetic sense. This is surrogacy, the monsignor argues, even if the woman plans to keep the child after birth. He points out that Donum vitae  classifies surrogate motherhood as illicit, and he quotes from the document regarding frozen embryos: “In consequence of the fact that they have been produced in vitro, those embryos which are not transferred into the body of the mother and are called ‘spare’ are exposed to an absurd fate, with no possibility of their being offered safe means of survival which can be licitly pursued.”

In his book published last year, Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life (Our Sunday Visitor), Dr. May devotes one section to the issue of embryo adoption, laying out the arguments of those who oppose and those who approve the procedure and adding his own reasons for approving. Rejecting the notion that “the moral object specifying the human act of a woman who seeks to rescue a frozen embryo” is surrogate motherhood, May concludes that the “precise object in rescuing the frozen embryo is thus more properly identified as transferring it from the freezer to the woman’s womb,” or adoption [emphasis in original].2 The act of adoption requires providing a home for the one adopted, and the only proper home for an embryo is a womb. Msgr. Smith thinks Dr. May and others of his view are allowing the good intention of embryo adoption to define the act itself. “I know what the couples intend: to adopt. But what do they have to do to bring that intention about?” he asks. The act of making yourself pregnant, of “donating your womb,” violates the “underlying principles of the procreative act and the nature of marriage,” he insists.

Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, O.F.M., a Franciscan brother and physician, who heads the medical-ethics department at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in New York, sides with Msgr. Smith. In embryo adoption, he maintains, a woman who is not the genetic mother is taking on a condition, pregnancy, which in moral terms is connected to preceding (and exclusive) acts of intercourse with her husband. The fact that a woman gets pregnant apart from such intercourse “creates a situation in which there is in a sense a third biological parent, the ‘adopting’ mother. This introduces new complications and unfamiliar familial relationships which are in and of themselves problematic.” Allowing the embryos to die in their frozen state is the only moral response that Dr. Sulmasy sees. The author of Killing and Allowing to Die, he states, “This would be a version of allowing to die. They will die as natural a death as possible given the unnatural course of their lives.”

Robert George, a professor of politics at Princeton, agrees with Dr. May that a woman’s choice to adopt a frozen embryo may in some cases be laudable. He does concede that this sort of adoption may involve using your body as an instrument, a means, and that doing so may reduce the value of the body and of pregnancy as goods in themselves. However, Professor George concludes, there is “a more compelling case for permissibility.” He points out that the Catholic Church has not made a definitive statement on this new technology, which means that theologians and other experts have a duty to come forward with their best arguments on a still-developing issue. The difficulty of the questions, he adds, obliges those on both sides to work out their answers in humility and mutual respect.

Bishop Elio Sgreccia, of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said last spring that embryo adoption has “an end which is good” and cannot be dismissed as illicit. But given the high failure rate of implantation and the fact that the process of freezing and thawing may cause many embryos to suffer genetic damage, he concludes, “Can we really counsel women to do this? It would mean counseling heroism . . . The issue is one big question mark. The point is we should never have gone down this road to begin with.”3

Richard Doerflinger, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, raises an additional question. Doerflinger, who has gone before Congress during the stem-cell debate to defend the lives of frozen embryos, tends to favor embryo adoption in theory but has doubts about its prudence. Reminding us that the Church views in vitro fertilization (IVF) as immoral in itself, Doerflinger wonders whether it is wise to cooperate with IVF clinics in recovering the frozen embryos for adoption. Would such cooperation give IVF a more positive moral spin and raise the status of the clinics, with the result that more people will seek IVF and more embryos will be frozen?

The issue is not just a Catholic one. Pro-lifers of all backgrounds have an interest in how embryos are treated. Clarke Forsythe, head of the nondenominational Americans United for Life, says that AUL has no official stand but he personally sees no moral objection to embryo adoption. He adds, however, that the difficult debate should lead to laws regulating the number of embryos that can be produced in any given attempt at fertilization. Ideally, he says, no embryos should be left over and frozen, because immersing a person in liquid nitrogen with the intention of keeping him or her there for an undetermined length of time violates that person’s dignity. “Pro-lifers have fallen down on this issue and over the past 25 years have done little to discourage the production of ‘excess’ embryos,” he admits. For those already produced, he adds, “We’ve got to get the issue beyond the abstract . . . Adoption is a good alternative beyond all the bad alternatives.”

Keeping the embryos alive in liquid nitrogen could, as Msgr. Smith has pointed out, be considered “extraordinary” means of life support, and there is no obligation to use extraordinary means to keep a person alive. However, what if someone is willing to take them out of the extraordinary state and give them a very ordinary, in fact necessary, means of support—i.e. a womb?

I spoke recently with one Catholic woman, married for years and childless, who was disturbed to find that the Church has no settled teaching in this area. She could not see why embryo adoption might be viewed as a violation of marital or family integrity, although she did admit that opening her womb to a life produced by strangers was not what she had in mind when she took her marriage vows. Like normal adoption, she conceded, embryo adoption is not ideal, but again like normal adoption, she argued, it makes the best out of a bad situation in which the natural parents will not or cannot bring up their own children. In the case of frozen embryos, she thought, the case is even more compelling since they face certain death after a suspended life if left in their neglected state. “I know that a good end doesn’t justify the means,” she told me. “But what’s wrong with the means?”

Some of the experts agree with her. “Somebody, this frozen human embryo, is going to die,” says Father Joseph Howard, director of the American Bioethics Advisory Commission, a division of American Life League. “Doctors can use experimental treatment in such cases to heal. There is an ethical obligation to do what one can to save a life. It is a question of saying that the human person has dignity. This is a sufficiently grave assault on the life of this new human person to intervene to maintain that dignity, to save that life.”

As Dr. Dianne Irving, a biochemical researcher, advises us: “Think of the adopting mothers. How profoundly sensitive they must be not only to the reality of the life at that early stage, but to the destruction that the embryos may undergo through illicit research. It would be a heroic act” to rescue them.

Geoffrey Surtees, a former student of May’s, who fueled the ongoing debate with a 1996 response to Msgr. Smith in the pages of Homiletic and Pastoral Review, contends that embryo adoption has nothing at all to do with procreation. The procreative act, he maintains, has been completed in IVF, and what exists now is an early human being whose life can be saved only if he or she is taken into someone’s womb.4

Mary Geach, an English philosopher, could not disagree more. A wife and a mother, Geach brings a personal understanding to the moral question. As Dr. May summarizes her argument, “She claims that if a woman makes her womb available to the child of strangers and allows herself to be made pregnant by means of a technical act of impregnation, she shares in the evil of in vitro fertilization . . . she ruins reproductive integrity.” Geach’s major point “is that by allowing herself to be made pregnant by the technician’s art a woman engages in a highly defective version of the marital act.”5

The issue is most complex. On the one hand, a woman offering her womb as the only safe and natural home for an abandoned embryo may be an eloquent witness to the true humanity and dignity of these tiny beings. She may, in fact, bring society to its senses.

On the other hand, embryo adoption, even when all the moral distinctions are made, can feed into the notion that relations between men and women are merely instrumental and that choosing pregnancy outside of marital intimacy can be a general good. It could give an altruistic gloss to in vitro fertilization and make deep-freeze labs seem like unusually ordered adoption agencies.   

In my mind now is the question that nagged me all the time I was preparing this article. Would I approve of my wife “adopting” an embryo into her womb? My instinctive answer is, No. (Fortunately, my wife shares my view.)

To me, the choice of adopting an embryo makes a woman redefine herself in terms of something that is at the root of her being: her ability to get pregnant, bear new life, become a mother. To separate this inherent capacity from the intimacy of conjugal relations goes too far. It not only separates a wife from her husband, by interposing another impregnating party; it separates a woman from herself if she uses her womb merely as an instrument for the good end of saving a life.

As I say this, I think of those embryos in the deep freeze who could still be born into this world and hope I am not right. 

NOTES

 

1. Couples who used the services of this agency and the children they adopted as embryos testified  against embryonic stem cell research in congressional hearings in July.

2. “Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life,” Our Sunday Visitor (Huntington, Ind.), 2000.

3. Catholic World Report, May 2001, p. 57.

4. Geoffrey Surtees, “Adoption of a Frozen Embryo,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review (August-September 1996).

5. May, pp. 96, 99.

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