Across Britain on Thursday, medical workers in the country's 73 licensed infertility clinics will for the first time be subjected to an unusual law requiring that unclaimed frozen human embryos be destroyed after five years.
More than 3,000 of the embryos, each no larger than the dot at the end of this sentence, are expected to be thawed and "allowed to perish," as authorities put it. The Catholic Church has protested, with a Vatican newspaper calling the action a "prenatal massacre" and urging that women volunteers bring the "orphan" embryos to term in "prenatal adoptions."
The looming British deadline, which has sparked sensational media coverage there, highlights basic dilemmas associated with freezing human embryos, the ultimate suspended animation. Those typically four-celled specks may remain viable for decades, scientists say, and even the most liberal ethicists are disturbed by the prospect of freezers chockablock with potential people, who might be born long after their genetic parents are gone.
Moreover, the clamor in Britain highlights what many researchers say is a lax approach to producing test-tube babies in the United States. "We don't have any clear law over what to do with a frozen embryo that isn't claimed," said Albert Jonsen, an ethicist at the University of Washington and chairman of the National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction.
But the leading U.S. professional group, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is for the first time drawing up guidelines for dealing with "abandoned embryos." It has proposed that clinics be allowed to destroy frozen embryos after five years if the donor couple have disappeared without leaving specific instructions to store the tissues longer.
"We don't like having large numbers [of embryos] in the bank," said the society's president, Dr. Mary Hammond, a fertility specialist at the North Carolina Center for Reproductive Medicine, a private clinic in Raleigh. "It's a tremendous responsibility." The abandoned embryos in the U.S. haven't been counted, Hammond said, but other researchers have estimated that the number is as high as 20,000.
The society's members are split over the need for federal regulation like that in Britain, she said. Some welcome it, arguing that it would ease the burden of deciding what to do; currently, many clinics fear being sued if they destroy stored tissues without the donors' permission. But others resist such oversight, saying it would interfere with the doctor-patient relationship.
