A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about StemLifeLine, a California company that has recently begun offering a unique service to couples who have created human embryos by means of in vitro fertilization (IVF). The company offers to take their remaining frozen (cryopreserved) embryos and “transform” them into “useful” stem cells. The company’s entire premise—to take these embryos, destroy them, and derive from them stem cells that would be “customized” for use by either the father or mother—is, as I pointed out, a complete sham: tissues developed from stem cells derived from these embryos, if implanted in either parent, would require life-long immunosuppression, lest the tissues be rejected by their bodies. So much for “customized” stem cells. As I stated at the time, however, the very existence of this company—notwithstanding its phony advertising—is a powerful reminder that the age of embryo-based biomedicine is now upon us.

For the past two years, we have also seen significant efforts in the U.S. Congress to press for legislation that would “free up” the existing population of frozen IVF embryos for research purposes. In spite of these efforts, it is clear that under the present administration the current federal prohibition on using federal funding to destroy IVF embryos for research will stand. (It may not in future administrations.)

But such realities have brought to the forefront a difficult and disturbing moral question: what can be done ethically with those IVF embryos judged unsuitable or no longer intended for transfer into the womb?

In the survival-of-the-fittest world of IVF, multiple embryos are manufactured from the eggs and sperm of couples pursuing pregnancy by this means. Surplus embryos—those not implanted immediately—are placed in suspended animation, their initial cellular development arrested at the very outset of their existence, sometimes even at the one-cell stage. Immersed in a soup of cryoprotectant chemicals, then sucked into straws, these embryos are then entombed in tanks of liquid nitrogen and instantaneously frozen. Just under four hundred thousand such embryos are preserved in IVF clinics in the United States alone according to the most recent, reliable study produced in 2003 by the Rand corporation.

The Catholic Church continues to teach that recourse to IVF as a remedy for infertility is morally illicit. The Church rejects this as a morally viable option on the grounds that children have a right to be brought into the world, not through the dexterity of lab technician’s hand, but through the unitive and procreative act of conjugal intercourse of a man and woman united in marriage. Children brought into the world through IVF are not generated, but literally manufactured. . While the Church endorses any number of licit means of assisting the marital act, we maintain that it is morally illicit to substitute that act with technical interventions—which is precisely what happens in the case of IVF.

There should not be 400,000+ human embryos currently stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen. The entire IVF enterprise is to be credited for bringing about the stunning and absurd moral predicament. The probing question that now faces so many IVF parents is: what to do with the remaining embryos that they do not intend to gestate?

Couples in this situation are forced to choose from the following options: allow their offspring to be kept in frozen storage indefinitely; have the embryos removed from frozen storage and allowed to expire naturally or be “disposed of” as laboratory waste; give up the embryos to scientific research; or give up the embryos for adoption by another couple.

I would suggest that choosing to keep the embryos in frozen storage indefinitely only delays the inevitable—eventual death through organismic decay while in the frozen state. Noting that the thawing process itself often kills IVF embryos being prepared for transfer, some moralists object to the prospect of a couple choosing to thaw their embryos, allowing them to expire naturally. I believe that a sound argument can be made for the removal of frozen embryos from their storage containers on the grounds that continued cryopreservation constitutes an extraordinary and ultimately futile means of continued existence—an absurd and tragic existence to be sure. Allowing the embryos to die is not the same as directly killing them. Directing lab technicians to “dispose” of the embryos is ethically unacceptable as this entails taking actions directly on the embryos with the intention of destroying them. A recent study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania discovered that protocols for the disposal of excess embryos at American IVF clinics varies in surprising ways, including quasi-religious ceremonies. The study also suggests that such disposal creates serious problems of conscience for clinicians, many of whom opt out of involvement in the disposal procedure.

Parents who decide to remove their embryos from frozen storage to allow them to die naturally should be encouraged to ask their pastor whether some blessing or other appropriate ceremony might be possible. The remaining embryos (though microscopic) should be treated with the degree of respect due to all human remains.

Obviously, embryos should never be sacrificed upon the altar of biomedical research. Such a decision would constitute a grave affront to human dignity and a direct assault on innocent human life. No putative medical benefit can justify the direct killing of a human being.

I would not exclude the possibility of donating cells from an embryo after its death. If a criterion for embryonic death can be established, it may be moral to donate cells from a deceased embryo just as one might from any child who dies.

Catholic theologians continue to be of diverse opinions, however, on the question of embryo adoption: the licitness, that is, of implanting unwanted IVF embryos into the wombs of women willing to gestate them to term with the intention of “rescuing” them from almost certain death, or even to adopt them outright. The Holy See has not expressed a definitive moral judgment on the matter. Some theologians hold that such a proposition is not only morally licit, but even heroic. Others hold—at least in the case of married women—that such a prospect (which entails the woman’s becoming pregnant apart from the intervention of her husband), though noble in its intention, would constitute a grave violation of the marriage covenant.

At a Westchester Institute Scholars Forum, held in October 2004 we engaged in a thorough examination of Catholic arguments for and against embryo adoption. These arguments were later gathered and published in detail in a volume of essays entitled Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage and the Right to Life. Later this week, I will be speaking on this topic at a gathering of the Catholic Medical Association.

My on-going exposure to the field of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research compels me to believe that the interest in embryo-based scientific research is growing—research we should remember that might have little or nothing to do with eventual cures to which such research might directly or indirectly contribute. I am convinced that today we stand on the verge of an era in which such embryo-destructive research could become common-place. There are any number of grim indications that a majority of Americans are slowly being cajoled into endorsing such a barbarous plan. To avoid such a future, we must demand that lawmakers pursue a complete federal ban on the creation in vitro of human embryos for any purpose other than implantation in a human womb. Surely Americans have not yet reached such a state of moral confusion as to fail to see the reasonableness of such a moral boundary line. But I have reasons to wonder…

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