Month: March 2006

A woman, preparing to undergo treatment for ovarian cancer, treatment she knows will render her infertile, has embryos with her then-boyfriend frozen.

Treatment succeeds, but sterility ensues. Couple breaks up, and the guy withdraws his consent to have the embryos emplanted and brought to term .

Can the woman do so anyway? Evidently not, according to British courts and, now, the European Court of Human Rights.

Lawyers for Evans had said the British law, which requires both the man and women to give consent, infringes her human rights.

She said her right to privacy and family life and the embryo’s right to life were being violated by Johnston’s decision to withdraw his permission for use of his sperm. She also argued his attempt to block her having the baby was discriminatory.

The court said it sympathized Evans’ plight, but ruled that Johnston’s withdrawal of consent for the use of his sperm did not violate her right to family life as stipulated in Europe’s human rights convention.

It’s a sticky situation, definitely, and you could probably slice the moral and ethical conundra five or six ways depending on how you view such things. To what extent should both donors have veto rights over bringing an embryo to term? While it resembles the abortion rights debate over “it’s my body,” we’re talking here about something of, but exterior to, the woman’s body, which reframes that whole question. Or does it? If the embryo was already implanted, nobody would agree that the male donor (Johnston, here) had the right to demand an abortion.

Anmother complication is resposibility. At some point, both partners evidently agreed that having kids in the future was an obligation they were willing to take on — presumably. It’s possible, of course, that he was simply feigning interest in same, or didn’t really consider the implications, though that seems unlikely given the efforts involved, and might simply be chalked up to “well, you’re stuck with the decision now.”

Except, of course, he’s not, since the permission to implant is not, evidently, made at the time the embryos are fertilized but at the time of implantation, which separation of acts and decision can lead to, well, just this situation, where someone changes their mind.

The responsibilities of the partner that wants to opt out of this situation aren’t necessarily clear. On the one hand, could the male donor be If Johnston were to be somehow be legally relieved of all obligations toward any offspring, would that change the equation? I suspect for some folks it might, but it also might not — the knowledge that he had a genetically-linked child out there might well be of concern to him, morally and emotionally.

And while we’re talking “he” here, the questoins could also be asked in reverse. What if Johnston wanted to take the embryos and, with a different woman, have them emplanted and grown to term, to be raised by him as his own? If Evans objected, would her case here be any stronger than his one in real life? Or would (should) his rights be any different? If so, why?

Indeed, this raises the whole issue of the extent and boundaries (legal and moral) that we control our genetic material. Sperm and eggs (and, for that matter, all manner of cells from which, someday, clones could be made) get “wasted” all the time. But once fertilization takes place, folks start feeling very proprietary about them, and the added complications of in vitro fertilization complicates or obscures matters further.

That doesn’t even deal with the (again) abortion-related question over whether destroying the embryos in question is morally okay. And, of course, the very nature of these sorts of things means there are always extra/excess embryos, even if Evans had received permission to have one of them implanted (which is part of the Catholic Church’s objections to these sorts of procedures). Those embryos are in a very odd limbo — not human enough (so to speak) to warrent legal protection, but of intense emotional value both for what they are and for what they (or some of them) might turn out to be. It’s … odd.

All of this discussion is outside of what’s legal, of course. Britain evidently has (and, presumably, the US does as well) certain legal and contractual arrangements over this whole issue, which have now survived a challenge to the ECHR. But the law is, often as not, concerned with the practical, not with the moral and ethical. It represents guidelines and compromises. The “right” answers here are a hell of a lot cloudier, it seems to me.

The technology and science behind this is wonderful, and the options it gives individuals and couples can be miraculous. But options often raise complications, and these are some pretty thorny ones.

Ugh.

(via Blogging Baby)