Just prior to the recent Senate vote on federal funding of
embryonic stem cell research, Liza Mundy, Washington Post
reporter and the author of
Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing
Men, Women, and the World, espoused the view that infertility
is a separate reason for destructive experiments on embryonic
humans. (“A
Debate’s Tiny Casualties: Multiple Births Raise a Key Issue for
Embryo Research,” Washington Post, June 5, 2007, p. A17.)
While the embryonic stem cell debate has revolved around curing
diseases that affect adults and children, her stated motivation is
compassion for children born as a result of fertilization outside
the womb (in vitro fertilization or IVF) and who are ill
because they were born via IVF unnecessarily as twins or triplets
or quadruplets. These are the “tiny casualties” of the debate. Who
can argue with compassion for ill children? But let’s parse her
logic.
She starts with infertility. “[O]ne in seven couples struggles
with infertility,” she writes. She implies that all infertile
people seeking IVF are couples — married or unmarried — when in
fact some portion are single women and, as she stated on the May 15
“Diane Riehm Show,” some are gay men who have donor eggs fertilized
with their sperm through IVF and some of the resulting embryos are
transferred to surrogate mothers. She neither defines infertility
nor tells us whether the definition or the percentage of afflicted
people has changed over time nor whether the percentage is
projected to increase in the future. She does not mention the
various causes of infertility. One cause is the epidemic of
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) the transmission of which is
fully and easily preventable. Arguably, the infertility of a woman
resulting from her advanced age is normal and should not qualify as
infertility, but Ms. Mundy does not discuss this. Nor in this brief
op-ed piece does she discuss the option of not having children or
of adoption.
Next, she discusses only one method of dealing with infertility,
IVF. She does not mention what percentage of infertile people opt
for IVF because they are not able to deal successfully with
infertility through such means as surgery or drugs or changes in
lifestyle.
Then she deals with multiple embryo transfer after IVF.
“[D]octors in the nation’s 400 IVF clinics routinely transfer two,
three or more embryos [fertilized through IVF] into a woman’s
uterus at a time. They do this because they have no reliable way of
telling which embryo has the crucial ability to develop into a
fetus.” Ms. Mundy neither informs us of any disadvantages to using
single, over multiple, embryo transfer, nor that some countries
prohibit multiple embryo transfers. She does tell us how many
people choose single embryo transfer. She does tell us that many
will choose multiple embryo transfer and “are happy to embrace the
prospect of multiples, welcoming an instant multi-child
family.”
Next, she states that “[o]ne factor among several in the rise of
multiple births is” IVF due to multiple embryo transfer. She does
not identify the other factors or the weight to be assigned to IVF.
(For example, using her figures, if there were no IVF twins, the
number of twins between 1980 and 2004 would still have increased
65%.) She does not tell us how many decline the option of aborting
all but one embryo after transfer (what is termed “selective
reduction”) for which there are of course risks to mother and
intended survivors, an option Ms. Mundy discussed on the May 15
“Diane Riehm Show.” She does say that more than half of the 50,000
children born in the United States annually through IVF are “part
of a set.” This would be, then, some 25,000 children.
But not all of these 25,000 children born annually in the United
States are the subject of her concern — only those born with low
birth weights and various disorders, and then, only when this
occurs from being born as a member of a multiple set. Ms. Mundy
opens her op-ed piece by referring to the “stunning escalation” in,
an “epidemic of,” multiple births in the United States over the
past 30 years that “not coincidentally” occurred with a rise in
“premature births, infants born with low birth weights and
disorders — such as cerebral palsy — that can occur when a
premature baby’s brain is insufficiently developed.” And later in
her piece she provides some statistics showing the relationship
between birth as a member of a multiple set and these health
problems, but she doesn’t give us numbers, from a survey or through
calculation, as to how many of the 25,000 children born via IVF in
multiple sets have these health problems.
It should be observed that her proposal would not help avoid the
birth of children with low birth weights and various disorders who
were not conceived via IVF. And, although Ms. Mundy refers to
mothers who, giving birth to sets of children, suffer increased
rates of postpartum hemorrhage, infection and death, increasing our
knowledge of what embryos will be viable will not help the mothers
who had conceived their children without IVF.
IN SUM, HER LOGIC IS THAT (1) large numbers of people are
infertile; (2) for some of these, having a genetically-related
child may not be possible without IVF; (3) doctors use multiple
embryo transfer rather than single embryo transfer because they
cannot predict which embryos would be viable; (4) because multiple
embryo transfer is used, half of all children born via IVF are
multiple births; (5) multiple births produce children who are more
likely than children born singly to be premature and have low birth
weights and various disorders. If scientists can experiment on
embryos, they will be able to predict the viability of embryos, and
can utilize single embryo transfer, thereby avoiding multiple
embryo transfers and multiple births.
Ms. Mundy blames the Congress for our lack of knowledge of what
embryos are likely to be viable. She refers to the 1996
Dickey-Wicker Amendment that prohibits the federal funding of
research involving the creation or destruction of embryos. She
fails to discuss knowledge to be gained through state or private
funding or foreign research. She fails to discuss why federal
taxpayers must be compelled to pay for her proposed research, why
her proposed research has any greater priority than other federal
expenditures of whatever type, including health research on the
heart, cancer or Alzheimer’s or on the causes of infertility, or
car safety or environmental health, or how much money would be
required over how much time. It’s the principle. She doesn’t like
the ban.
Ms. Mundy ends her argument where many would begin — not with
the laudable morality of learning more to enhance the health of
infants and their mothers — but with the morality of experimenting
on embryonic human beings that results in their demise (a fact she
never mentions) and the morality of compelling taxpayers to fund
it. “Embryos do deserve special moral status,” she tells us. How
special? Not very special because “the other group [of what? human
beings?] that lacks a voice in this debate” also have a special
moral status, she says. These are the “children who owe their
lives…to the science that made them.” Actually, she does not mean
that the children now born using IVF will be helped; she means the
children born in the future using IVF.
Let’s be clear what Ms. Mundy proposes. First, she wants federal
taxpayers to be required to pay for the experimentation on, and
destruction of, embryonic humans. Second, the purpose of this
activity is to gain knowledge to help doctors score embryos for
viability and health. An embryo with the highest score will be
transferred into the womb — as a single embryo transfer — so a
multiple birth will not occur. The embryos with lower scores will
be frozen or destroyed. These are in vitro abortions. Since the
enhanced knowledge of embryology will not help the losers, it is
not therapeutic to them; it is eugenic. So, there are two groups of
embryos who will be destroyed: those experimented on and those
destroyed as not deemed sufficiently viable.
She states that the UK law that limits experimentation on
embryos only for their first 14 days of existence (and then to be
destroyed if they have not already been) “seems reasonable and
worth emulating,” but she does not say why this is reasonable.
Would scientific need ever be trumped by the special moral status
of the embryo? Once scientists have learned everything they can
from 14-day old embryos, why not raise the limit to 30 days or even
to full-term prior to live birth?
A TELLING PHRASE OF MS. MUNDY is her description of IVF as the
science that makes children. If science makes these embryos, then
science should be allowed to unmake them, to study them, to destroy
them. During the existence, I dare say life, of the embryos subject
to research, they will be slaves. Slavery is not necessarily based
on race. White people have had white slaves and black people have
had black slaves. It is a condition — a condition of involuntary
servitude. In its own words, the 13th Amendment does not ban the
enslavement of persons; it bans slavery — without stating who or
what could be a slave. (“Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude… shall exist within the United States…”) Obviously,
only human beings can be slaves; we refer for instance to some
animals as beasts of burden, not as slaves. Nonetheless, we should
not expect that would we would first describe a class of human
beings as persons and then ban that class’ slavery. If we viewed
them as persons, we would not enslave them. Slaveholding societies
across time and space have enslaved only the humans they did not
perceive as persons. And they did not understand this to be
inconsistent with the possibility that some members of the same
class could be free. So, the fact that we do not (yet) grant
personhood under the federal Constitution to embryonic humans is
not a reason to reject the notion that they can be slaves.
Embryonic humans are individuals of the species Homo
sapiens and can, therefore, be slaves — even while their
sibling embryos, even their identical twin embryos, can be
transferred into a womb and be born free.
At this point we should observe that slavery in America evolved
into the institution it became in 1861. It did not descend upon us
from England in one fell swoop. It began with the first slave. It
moved from colony to colony. The customs, and then the laws, of who
could be enslaved and who could not be, of the differences between
indentured servants and slaves, of who could be freed and who could
not be, of whether children of slave men or slave women were
slaves, of whether slaves could be sexually or physically assaulted
— all of this evolved. If a new slavery were to enter our society,
we would not expect it to occur other than in small beginnings.
Ms. Mundy states we do not know “whether embryos are affected by
the media in which they are cultured, and the long-term impact of
the increasingly invasive lab techniques that IVF now often
involves.” Thus, once sold or donated to researchers, embryonic
humans will be totally under the control of the researchers who
will study them with dyes and drugs, remove cells, split open
cells, and ultimately kill them. They will be slaves.
Once federally funded, eventually there would be no reason for
Congress to debate limiting the purposes of such research or
limiting the conditions of such research. There would be no
principle upon which to oppose growing embryos, even to full term,
for their organs for the morally laudatory goal of transplanting
them to the sick.
Accordingly, not only do I reject Ms. Mundy’s proposal, I
propose in its stead that Congress enact legislation implementing
the 13th Amendment’s ban on slavery as Section 2 of the 13th
Amendment allows. Congress should not limit itself to its current
ban on federal funding of this slavery under the Dickey-Wicker
Amendment but should impose a broader ban, a ban on the slavery
itself, a ban on the creation of human embryos for any purpose
other than their own lives.
