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.
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Life on Ice
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Anderson has tried to make each option hassle-free. He has developed relationships with scientists who use surplus embryos in their research. About a decade ago, he partnered with a San Diego firm that became one of the first institutions to derive stem cells from human embryos. (At least one of those cell lines was among the 21 eligible for federally funded research under President George W. Bush.)
The renewed attention given to stem-cell research may make this kind of donation more appealing to Anderson's patients, he says: "It used to be that we would ask, 'Are you interested in donation to research?' and many [people] didn't really know what that meant." And now that President Barack Obama has decided that federal funding should be available for work on stem cells derived from leftover embryos, research demand is likely to intensify. Today Anderson is collaborating with a new stem-cell company, and about 50 of his current patients have signed up to have their embryos sent there.
He has also developed a donor-embryo program for patients who'd prefer to give their excess embryos to other people who are struggling to conceive. But knowing that your genetic child will be raised by another family isn't easy for many people. "That's the smallest group, and for obvious reasons," Anderson says.
Despite Anderson's efforts, most of the unneeded or abandoned embryos continue to sit in their tanks. Anderson says he feels burdened by them, but not because of the maintenance or associated costs. "It's all these unresolved issues. At some point, it just gets ridiculous. In a perfect world," he says, "when a couple is done with having all their children, they would make a decision. The farther and farther we get from that, the less likely they are to make a decision." And sometimes patients simply disappear. "I wish there was a way of making a disposition on a lot of these embryos that have been abandoned," Anderson says.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which represents fertility doctors, says it is acceptable to destroy embryos if the patients they belong to have been out of touch for five years. Few clinics in the U.S. follow the guideline, however. "If nothing else, it would be a public-relations nightmare if anyone who has custody of embryos decided to terminate them," says bioethicist Lori Andrews, who teaches at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. But keeping embryos on ice indefinitely is not much of a solution. "There's really no forever," Andrews says, pointing out that some IVF clinics have been forced out of business by the recession. The bottom line, she says, is that "we have no agreement over the social or moral status of the embryo. We need to be more forward-looking in terms of the policies and regulation."
The lack of clear regulations also leaves clinics open to the ever-present threat of a lawsuit. Numerous cases dealing with embryo custody have wended their way through the judicial system in recent decades. The parents of a woman who died in 1996 sued for control of the embryos she'd frozen before she underwent treatment for leukemia. Later that decade, two couples sued Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, R.I., after it lost track of several of their embryos. Many other cases have involved disputes between divorced couples.
Anderson says he may ask UC-Irvine to cover storage costs for the unclaimed Saddleback embryos housed in his lab, although he'd prefer a more definitive decision from the parents about what to do with them. He believes that at least a few of them date from the 1980s, suggesting that their clinical value is limited. But as Anderson notes, any of them could still be viable. "Twice I've used embryos that were frozen for 10 years, and both times it resulted in twins," he says. When the potential of human life is involved, it seems there are no simple answers.
© 2009
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