The destruction of frozen embryos: reflection on a news story
Gonzalo Herranz. departmentde Bioética, Universidad de Navarra.
lectureDelivered in Bogotá, 1997.
The destruction of 3300 embryos that had reached their expiry date under British law was not news to entertain the European summer. On or around 1 August 1996, when many people were going on holiday, these tiny human beings came to the forefront of the news in conversations, newspaper articles, radio interviews and television reports. It is appropriate for us doctors to reflect on what happened, because it puts our deepest ethical convictions at test.
It is easy to relate what happened. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 provides in the UK that frozen embryos can be retained for a period of 5 years deadline. Consequently, embryos frozen before 1 August 1991, the date of the law's entry into force entrance, and which had not been used had to be destroyed by the end of 31 July 1995, deadlineof their preservation.
It was obvious that this moment had to come. Already, at the very beginning of the year, the alarm bells rang in the pages of the British Medical Journal. On 1 May 1996, the body implementing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act amended its Code, stating that human embryos should never be kept beyond the normal maximum period of 5 years unless the persons who have provided the gametes, including donors, request a longer storage period, that human embryos should never be kept beyond the maximum period specified by these persons, and that it would be exceptional to extend storage beyond 10 years. Faced with the granting of this extension, the assisted reproduction centres tried to locate the biological parents of the cryopreserved embryos, as it is they, according to agreement, who must decide on the fate of the embryos. It was not an easy task to contact so many and so dispersed. By the expiry of deadline, almost two thirds of them had been found. These were the ones who were able to accept, and did so en masse, the new rules and regulations.
However, by 31 July, there were some 3300 embryos whose parents either could not be located or decided to abandon them. These embryos were thawed and destroyed in various ways: left to die at room temperature, immersed in alcohol, subjected to osmotic shock in hypotonic saline, disposed of by landfill or sent to the incineration furnace.
Responses and comments 
Although the event took place in the heart of the summer, commentary and controversy abounded. The press took it upon themselves to sentimentalise the occasion. agreementStories were told of parents who, having been informed late in the day by the press, tried to save their embryos at the last minute on their return from holiday, with little time to spare; of spouses, separated or not, who could not agree on what to do; or who were unable to make the necessary concurring decision because one of them was unable to do so. One London couple rhetorically dramatised the farewell to the twelve embryos they were leaving to die by extinguishing the flame of twelve candles: the curious thing is that, with such a theatrical and aesthetic gesture, they intended to disavow the Vatican organ L'Osservatore Romano, for having described the massive and legal destruction of embryos as a prenatal massacre.
The discussionwas open and the voices that rang out were many and dissonant, as befits the ethical pluralism of today's society. Some, shuddering with grief, recalled the slaughter of the innocents. Others were reassured when experts told them that the 3,300 embryos abandoned to die on 1 August are but a small fraction of those who die spontaneously in their mothers' wombs every day, either of natural causes or as a result of contraception. Surveys were recalled that, in the opinion of the majority, the early embryo, a rudimentary speck of life barely 0.2 mm in diameter, can be denied the rights of human dignity. The consciences of good citizens were assuaged when they realised that they were doing nothing more than complying with the law that the Parliament, which represents everyone, had Cfive years earlier.
Doctors did not remain silent. Some of those who practise in vitro fertilisation and who are responsible for the banks where supernumerary embryos are kept frozen said that the law was too rigid and lacked compassion. Others, on the other hand, were happy with the firm and unambiguous nature of the law, as it avoided any headaches: for them, any embryo not claimed as prescribed was an embryo that had to be destroyed, as keeping it was a criminal offence. They could not risk going to prison or having licencewithdrawn in order to continue working on specialization programto preserve lives that were no longer of interest to those who had promoted them. Finally, others said that it was understandable that parents who had already succeeded in having a child through assisted reproduction should forget about frozen embryos: they had already obtained what they were looking for.
The Church did not have to speak: it had already done so in the Encyclical Evangelium vitae, and earlier in the Instruction Donum vitae, when it declared licit only those interventions on the human embryo that respect its life and integrity.
Looking for false solutions
There is no lack of ideological resources to relax the ethical tension of the problem or to empty it of its moral content: on the ethical level, it is enough to take the view that human embryos have no human entity, that they are mere possibilities, a mere potentiality; on the legal level, it is enough to abide by the letter of the law: after all, laws are ethics, albeit minimal.
How strongly some people long for human embryos to be mere pre-human entities, and for us to be able to dispose of them as if they were things! Pathetically, as a publishing housein the Lancet put it: What a pity we can't think of a word that means "not allowed to develop beyond the four-cell stage". But such a word, if invented, would be a perverse word, a semantic trick, for it is a biological injustice to call the four blastomeres, which at that moment are the whole body of a human embryo, merely four cells. The same articlespoke of the fact that some critics use the expressions let perish, die or destroy as if we were dealing with a genocide of laboratory. But it is intentional sophistry to reject these words to describe the actual action of ending these nascent human lives, just as it would have been if someone had deliberately ended the life of each of us as four-cell embryos.
The law financial aidalso simplifies the problem, even circumvents it. The law, we are told, brings order to the chaos when it determines precisely who has to decide what is to be done with frozen embryos: all others must stay out of it, they must not interfere in what is private and in accordance with the law. Legal texts are territorial and offer different solutions in different parts of the world. Let the doctor decide, says, for example, the Spanish law, which leaves it up to the manager of the gamete and embryo bank to decide what to do with them, once two years of cryopreservation have elapsed. It is therefore the responsibility of the directors of the authorised banks to decide what to do with them. Let them decide, not the doctors, but the parents: this is what the English law assigns to the gamete suppliers in an indivisible and non-transferable manner. Neither doctors nor the parents: in Australia, it is the woman who has provided the oocyte who must decide. This is also the dominant view in the United States and the one most supported by jurisprudence: it states, in line with abortion ideology, that the woman is the owner of the status.
Facing up to the problem
Ethical problems cannot be solved by denying them or submitting them to legal arbitration. They must be accepted as such and studied honestly. A method that is sometimes very effective in analysing the complex problems of modern medical ethics is to begin by reducing the issue to its innermost core. In order to do this, they must be separated from the many attachments (sociological, psychological, political, economic) that surround them and make them difficult to analyse. In due course, it will be time to consider the circumstances, which are often of great ethical relevance.
It is therefore incumbent upon us to look ethically at what happened in early August in the UK. And what happened was that 3,300 human embryos whose cryopreservation had reached the legal expiry date were left to die. A headline in the Lancet put it starkly: First batch of embryos destroyed.
Three thousand three hundred human destinies were annulled. Three thousand three hundred human beings, who had been called to life by the decision of their parents and the technological partnershipof the doctors, met a dramatic end: they had been created to live, but destroyed. They were not begotten by chance, unnoticed, unwanted, in an erotic outburst manager. They were brought to life intentionally, as highly desired creatures, with full deliberation, with the aid of the technical artifice of laboratory. And yet, despite having originated from such a calculated and costly decision, they have been left to die.
I am sure that both the legislators, in drafting and approving the law, and the parents, in resorting to extracorporeal fertilisation, and the doctors, in applying their precise techniques, acted and will continue to act with the best of intentions. And yet, they did not want to realise that they were overstepping their power, that they were running the inevitable risk that, having fulfilled the pre-set lethal deadline, they would have to authorise the termination of the lives of human beings whom they had brought into existence to be children, but who, in the end, due to a thousand circumstances, diverse or adverse, became surplus to production.
Years ago, David Ozar wrote against the withdrawalof frozen human embryos. And he did so arguing from two different positions: from the point of view of those who think that we have the obligation to respect the life of the neo-conceived child, since it has, from the very moment of fertilisation, the right not to be killed; and from the point of view that the embryo has no moral rights, since embryos, including frozen ones, are not holders of rights, but mere things that are possessed by others.
There is no need to develop the first, conceptionist, view of the right to life, which imposes on us the obligation to help the embryo to realise its full human potential. We should, however, reconsider the second view. Doctors and parents who have brought an embryo into the world, even if they consider that their embryo has no intrinsic degree scrollto be respected, cannot, however, shirk their responsibilities with regard to the use they make of the embryo they have created and the consequences of their conduct if they destroy it. For common ethics, even minimal ethics, if it is authentic, that is, if it is not intoxicated with autonomism, demands that human life must always be preserved and protected. The physician cannot be indifferent to his twofold commitment: the general commitment to respect it in order to comply with the rules of humanity, and the specific commitment to care for human lives in a precarious state in order to comply with the rules of medicine. This commitment binds him in a particular way to those human lives that he has helped to create. The parents cannot abandon the embryonic child, thus shirking their duty of parental responsibility, of being protectors of the one they have procreated.
Destroying frozen embryos is one of the things that hardens the heart of society. It is paradoxically irresponsible to arbitrarily create human embryos, freeze them and then destroy them. Society favours the growth of its inner violence when it takes for good and legal the internshipof making human embryos in issueexcessive because it is economical and efficient, and then destroying them because it is just as economical and efficient to get rid of the surplus. We do not know if and to what extent the habit of periodically destroying the batch of "expired" embryos every year will contribute to increasing the tolerance of violence in society, but it would be foolish to say that it is of no importance and of no consequence.
Looking to the future
One thing became clear this time: the destruction of these embryos awakened the conscience of many, who have rethought their attitude to what seemed a routine and innocent technological application, and which has resultbecome for them a serious human and ethical problem, to which a solution must be found. The lengthening to ten years of the UK's legal deadlineauthorised conservation period simply serves to postpone to August 2001 the hot potato of the decision that they have not wanted to take now. Perhaps by then we will be in a better position to deal with the problem. But one thing is clear: if decisions are not taken now, the passage of time will contribute to multiplying the ethical dimensions of the problem.
Human beings cannot be treated in bulk, as if each individual were not valuable, immeasurably valuable. Those who persist in the internshipof assisted reproduction are not unaware that the problem created by surplus embryos is avoidable: it would be enough not to create in vitro more embryos than those that are going to be implanted immediately. And this issuemust be compatible with a gestation that can be completed with respect for the lives of children and mothers. This is a requirement of good professionalism. In the same way that it is a serious lack of skillto deliberately induce pregnancies with excessive twins Degree, which creates risks for children and mothers: today there are sufficient means of control available for these multi-twin pregnancies to occur. The World Medical Association associationhas recently spoken out strongly against selective embryo reduction.
Physicians and prospective parents should understand that procreation manager, including in any case the in vitro variant, requires unconditional acceptance of the offspring. The offspring produced in vitro are never the property of those who originate or preserve them. Never can the interest of science, of society or of a private individual prevail over the dignity and identity of a human being. The ethical condemnation of so-called assisted reproduction is based both on the attack on the dignity of procreation that is the artificial manipulation of the transmission of human life, and on the violent way in which the embryonic human being is treated in vitro. These human embryos are children - something that is often and deliberately overlooked - the children of a man and a woman. And they are so in that state of particular vulnerability and potential withdrawalwhich is statusin vitro. They are ordinary human beings, facing the travails and the days that all of us, to become what we are, have had to face. Each of us has inescapably needed to be an embryo and to begin our human existence in that minimal form, but full of strength and promise.
Because they are human, human embryonic offspring cannot be treated in the same way as animal embryos. To impose a zoological fate on the human embryo is to take a further slide down the downward slope of the dehumanisation of reproductive medicine. The expiry date for destroyed embryos in the UK marked a historic low in respect for human dignity.
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