Fr. Sibley asks what happens to the “extra” embryos generated in IVF procedures.
Apparently some of them are going to the new Mengeles of our day.
This month’s Harvard Magazine stated, in an article about the stem cell controversy, that Boston IVF, a local fertility-procedures practice, had donated 344 frozen embryos abandoned by their parents to be used for research. The product of this effort was 17 new stem-cell lines.
344 victims, and only 17 of the experiments on them produced usable material for future research. And apparently this is considered to meet ethical standards!
5 comments
Comments are closed.
If your “ethical standard” is that you can use any tiny little human for every purpose, then yes, it does meet their standard.
I’d like to gently ask a couple of questions, and see if I can get some “Catholic Light.” (Please don’t flame at me…)
On Aug 11, 2004, the UK government approved human embryo cloning using CNR (cell nuclear replacement). This is not a joining of male and female, but a throwing together of human egg and human somatic cell, just like Dolly the sheep. Earlier this year this was also reported to be successful in Korea. The British policy requires that all the embryos be destroyed after 14 days. Question: are these “people”? In theory, they could be implanted and born, as has been done with other animal experiments.
Second question. Whether the embryos are from IVF (joining male and female) or CNR, and not to be implanted and born as children, can funeral rites be held for them? The report cited by the Wire article indicates that some IVF clinics have funerals for the embryos. This seems permitted according to the Catechism, 1261. Would it make any sense to baptise the embryos, perhaps using a micro-pipette aspergillium?
Sadly, the vast majority of these human embryos seem to be under a death sentence from the moment of their creation. Are they worthy of funeral rites? Of baptism, of some sort? To what extent do we recognize their personhood? Do CNR and IVF embryos have the same standing? Should we have some sort of update of the Holy Innocents?
I’m just boggled and confused, and this is all kind of depressing.
I’d say as soon as a CNR zygote becomes fertilized and starts to function and develop in the same way as a naturally fertilized zygote, it is a human being and a person. Where there is a living body, there is a soul.
Embryos can be baptized while living and buried with a funeral after dying.
The question arises: do we have an obligation to attempt to protect the embryos and keep them safe for adoption and implantation? I suspect that implantation would be considered ‘extraordinary means’ of life-support and thus optional, although praiseworthy. On the other hand, keeping them frozen is probably not very difficult, so it becomes harder to call that ‘extraordinary’.
Folks, are you aware of how many babies were intentionally aborted in the development of the rubella vaccine? Women who were pregnant and had been exposed to rubella were aborted and the babies harvested in an attempt to grow a human cell line that could be used to develop the live virus vaccine. see the citations below.
We lost this battle 40 years ago, and we never even realized we were fighting it.
Attenuation Of RA 27/3 Rubella Virus in WI-38 Human Diploid Cells; Amer J Dis Child vol 118 Aug 1969
Explant cultures were made of the dissected organs of a particular fetus aborted because of rubella, the 27th in our series of fetuses aborted during the 1964 epidemic. The third explant, which happened to be from kidney, was selected arbitrarily for further study.
Studies of Immunization With Living Rubella Virus ; Arch J Dis Child vol 110 Oct 1965
“This fetus was from a 25-year-old mother exposed to rubella 8 days after last menstrual period. 16 days later she developed rubella. The fetus was surgically aborted 17 days after maternal illness and dissected immediately. Explants from several organs were cultured and successful cell growth was achieved from lung, skin, and kidney. It was then grown on WI-38. This new vaccine was tested on orphans in Philadelphia”.
b – The debates about when ensoulment happens were very long and involved hundreds of years ago in the Catholic Church.
As I understand it, the Church ended up in the position of saying that it simply didn’t know for sure and as it would be immoral to mistakenly condemn ensouled humans to death without any moral concern, the earliest date, conception was to be used.
Essentially, the Church’s position is that it would be depraved indifference to act in any other manner than it’s current doctrine that life begins at conception. The left is all about the precautionary principle on a whole host of subjects but when it comes to the subject of defining the beginning of life, convenience rules the roost.
As for CNR and other novel methods of creating an independent human being, the same objection of depraved indifference is waiting there for all of them. They would come under the same doctrine preferring life from the moment of conception, though I would guess that there would be sharp words, at least, about the adults who used those methods. That’s another doctrinal dispute for another day.