Last part:
I do agree with your last point that we should ALL (pro-life AND pro-choice)work harder to reduce unwanted pregnancies, and to make sure children whose birth families cannot care for them get real, loving families. Education is one thing we can do, beginning with our own kids. I think that's the point many of us on both sides miss - that we can't just sit around and make somebody ELSE do something about it - we have to be working for it ourselves. We have six children, and we talk to them about the responsibilities of sex. We are involved in their lives and their friends hang out at our house (what's a few more sandwiches?). We SHOULD be taking in pregnant mothers in crisis who have no homes and caring for them. We should be listening to them, not just talking at them. Caring for them rather than condemning them. You are right. We should be doing those things. I should be doing more of those things. And you know, if we were doing those things, caring for other people on a personal level, the government could legalize whatever it wanted and abortion could still be a rare choice.
Thanks for the debate. Iron sharpens iron, they say.
Life on Ice
In 1995, a California doctor took responsibility for thousands of unwanted embryos. He's still figuring out what to do with them.
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Police cruisers typically escort heads of state, but on a November morning in 1995, the VIP heading down California's Highway 405 was an ordinary-looking moving truck. It was, however, carrying some particularly fragile cargo: several metal tanks, each just larger than a beer keg, containing a total of roughly 2,000 frozen human embryos. They were being transported from a scandal-plagued IVF clinic in Laguna Hills, Calif., to their new adoptive home in Newport Beach. Today, many still remain there, unclaimed. The embryos' unusual journey illustrates just how complicated the business of assisted reproduction can get.
The story starts at Saddleback Memorial Hospital in Laguna Hills. The fertility clinic there had been shuttered earlier in 1995, when an investigation found that its doctors had mixed up embryos and impregnated women with eggs that weren't theirs. As many as 300 patients were thought to have been involved, and at least three cases had surfaced in which women had unwittingly given birth to children not theirs. The clinic's top doctors, Ricardo Asch and Jose Balmaceda, had fled the county. Thousands of unused or extra embryos were left behind, and because the clinic was run by the University of California, Irvine, they were in the custody of the state.
Officials asked several nearby fertility clinics to take the orphan embryos, but initially no one was willing; most clinic doctors preferred to stay clear of the scandal's taint. Dr. Robert Anderson felt differently. "To me, it seemed unfair to the couples," he says. Anderson agreed to house the frozen embryos at the clinic he'd opened three years earlier in Newport Beach, the Southern California Center for Reproductive Medicine. "I thought it was the right thing to do," he says with more than a hint of resignation. "I actually thought I was doing a good thing."
Anderson signed a contract laying out how he would take care of the embryos and releasing him from any liability related to their origins. He didn't ask for payment, and he never suspected he'd be taking care of some of the embryos nearly 15 years later.
His staff began the process of tracking down the patients connected to each set of embryos using records from the Saddleback clinic. When the patients could be found, they were asked to make a decision about what to do with their embryos, and until they decided, they were billed for storage, just as Anderson's own clients are. But because the University of California clinic was one of the first fertility centers in the world, many of its patients lived abroad, and tracking them down proved to be difficult. "We did what we could do," Anderson says. Today, about a thousand of the Saddleback embryos remain.
Even if the patients are available to make a choice about the embryos, the decision often isn't an easy one. Many couples opt to freeze extra embryos created for in vitro fertilization treatments; when they're finished with IVF, they must decide what to do with these little clusters of cells, which were a challenge to produce and expensive. There are an estimated half million unused embryos, some decades old, being stored around the nation in fertility centers like Anderson's. "There are huge differences in the thinking about what these embryos represent," Anderson says. "From 'they're leftover biological material' to 'they're little people'."
Between the remaining Saddleback embryos and the ones from his own patients, Anderson estimates that he is responsible for about 6,700 embryos. These tiny bits of humanity are housed in 19 Thermos-like tanks lining the walls and peeking out from under counters at his lab. Each one is full of liquid nitrogen, which keeps its temperature under 300 degrees below zero, and is equipped with an alarm that's set to go off if the nitrogen evaporates more quickly than it should. An embryologist checks on the tanks each week and tops them off.
Every year, Anderson's team bills the couples whom the embryos belong to—in most cases, the genetic parents; in others, the men and women who acquired the sperm or eggs to make them. Along with a notice requesting $300 for annual storage costs, the "owners" receive a reminder that there are options for embryos like theirs. They can be donated to research or given to another couple that's trying to conceive. Or they can be discarded as medical waste.
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