Posted by
Playful Walrus on Monday, June 04, 2007 12:22:31 PM
Kevin Sack of the
Los Angeles Times brings us another example of how some "solutions" to infertility cause more problems then they solve.AFTER two years of infertility treatments — from temperature monitoring and artificial inseminations to hormone injections and laparoscopic surgery - Augusta Roman felt her last, best hope for bearing a child was only hours away. Her doctor had retrieved 13 eggs from her ovaries, and six had been fertilized with the sperm of her husband, Randy Roman.
Why couldn’t they adopt?
Ten hours before the embryos were to be implanted in Augusta's womb, Randy emerged from their study and broke unfathomable news: Despite all she had endured, he couldn't go through with it.
The doctor's call announcing the creation of the embryos had crystallized nagging doubts about their marriage that he had harbored for years. He insisted on canceling the procedure and freezing the embryos while they attempted counseling to work through their differences.
[SNIP]
Counseling failed, and in August 2003, 16 months after the canceled embryo transfer, the couple mediated the dissolution of their six-year marriage. She got the house in this Houston suburb, near NASA's Johnson Space Center, and most of the furnishings. He got the 32-inch Sony TV, a futon and dinette set, and the 1998 Honda Civic.
They could not agree, however, on the disposition of one piece of community property - the three embryos of the original six that had survived the freezing process.
Augusta wanted to take possession and have them implanted, agreeing to release Randy from any financial or parental obligation.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG –
She can’t release him from his obligations to his children. The courts enforce those obligations “on behalf of the child”. The children could find lawyers to take there cases, especially if something happened to Augusta. If Augusta were to fall on hard times, her mind might change. If she ever applies for assistance, he’s on the hook. This is also why a man should
never, ever donate his sperm - either to a sperm bank or to a friend. It doesn't matter what someone says, what contract you sign, what the sperm bank promises - a man can still be put on the hook financially.
Randy wanted the embryos destroyed, or at least frozen indefinitely. He argued that even though he did not want to raise children with Augusta, he would never disavow his genetic offspring. As he would point out in court, the couple had initialed a cryopreservation consent form stipulating that should they divorce, any frozen embryos "shall be discarded."
So, he wants his children killed.
Roman vs. Roman now rests with the Supreme Court of Texas, one of a number of divorce cases nationwide in which the custody dispute has revolved around microscopic clumps of cells that are considered - by most states, at least - to be property and not human life.
See how complicated we make things when we get selfish and egocentric?
Because many IVF cycles generate more embryos than are actually used, hundreds of thousands of excess embryos remain in frozen storage in fertility clinics. A 2003 survey concluded there were about 400,000 frozen embryos in the U.S. alone, and some authorities estimate the number is growing by 50,000 a year.
This is madness. TRY ADOPTION. Why produce children just to kill them or abandon them???
Embryo storage and maintenance has become a huge headache for fertility clinics, which often cannot coax couples into either destroying or donating them to research or to other couples. It is unclear how long embryos can remain frozen and still generate a pregnancy, but the current record is 13 years. Often, fertility clinics lose contact with the embryos' owners well before then.
And with some regularity, couples separate without clear agreements about embryo disposition.
Because there is no federal precedent for settling such disputes, state courts have been left to make Solomonic decisions on embryo custody.
To date, the top courts of six states have ruled in such cases. While the case particulars have varied, a trend has emerged. In general, the courts have held that the right of one ex-spouse to not procreate trumps that of the other to procreate.
Uh, they’ve already procreated. If you cook up a dish, and then freeze it for safekeeping, you have already made the dish. Of course, thanks to abortion laws and rulings, we can’t admit that.
Of course, what the Times is really worried about is the potential of these cases to impact abortion. It will be really interesting if the courts decide a fetus isn’t a child if the mother doesn’t want it to be, but an embryo is a child if one of the parents believes it is.
THEIR lawyers believe such a case could provide the court with one of several means to undermine another Texas reproductive rights case, Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed a right to abortion. In that case, the justices explicitly avoided speculating on when life begins, but asserted that the unborn are not "persons" as encompassed by the 14th Amendment. Absolved of the need to balance the rights of the unborn against those of a pregnant woman, the court found that a woman's right to privacy allowed her to terminate a pregnancy.
However, the Roe decision came five years before the birth of the first test-tube baby. Socially conservative legal theorists, buoyed by the court's recent decision to uphold a ban on the midterm abortion procedure known as intact dilation and extraction, which opponents call "partial-birth abortion," believe a case involving frozen embryos could give an increasingly conservative court one vehicle for reconsidering the rights of the unborn, and to do so apart from the issue of a woman's right to control her own body. If their view held, Augusta Roman would gain control over the embryos.
ADOPTION, people.