According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, there are over 620,000 cryo-preserved embryos in the United States. Even though the “vast majority” of them are still being considered for use for “family building efforts” and others have been “earmarked by the creating couples for use in research,” there are still as many as 60,000 unclaimed frozen embryos currently. With the growing popularity of IVF, we should expect these numbers to rise dramatically over the coming years. All this has left pro-lifers scrambling for ethical solutions that free these children from their cryogenic prison. One Evangelical Christian group called Snowflake Embryo Adoption matches the embryos with women who are willing to “adopt” them. In essence the embryos are implanted into the wombs of women who carry them to term and raise them as their own children. This solution, as we shall see, is not without moral controversy.
We must first admit that the plight of these cryogenically preserved children represents one of the greatest injustices of our age because of the sheer numbers alone. But because many of the “consumers” of IVF are couples struggling with infertility, very few people are willing to call it out. Instead it remains hidden away in laboratories and freezers. Despite intrinsic evil of IVF, we must never forget that the children themselves are not an evil but a good that came from the evil. They are members of the human community, regardless of how they were conceived, and thus are subject with rights, including the right to a safe environment in which they can thrive. These voiceless children are crying out for justice, a cry that we are obligated not to ignore. Therefore, it would seem that “embryo adoption” offers a compassionate solution. The adoptive parents did not bring the children into existence and are simply looking for a way to “right a wrong” by rescuing these children from a frozen existence.
Adoption?
When framed in this manner, it seems rather straightforward that this type of adoption is an irrefutable good. But this is a case where we must be careful with our terms. To label this an embryo adoption is really a form of begging the question. This is why many moral theologians prefer the term “embryo rescue”. For everyone know that adoption is praiseworthy, but it is questionable whether this should be classified as a type of adoption. Adoption has always referred to a legal process by which a child (usually although not exclusively) enters into a family and assumes all the rights and duties of a biological son or daughter. Nowhere among these rights and duties however would we find the right to gestation. That right is reserved only for biological children. The question is whether this difference carries any moral weight.
The Church defines surrogacy as when “a woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of ‘donors’. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy” (Donum Vitae, A3). Based upon this definition, embryo rescue is more akin to surrogacy than to adoption. The only difference is in the intention of the pregnant woman—in one case she carries the child for another and in the other she carries it for herself. But surrogacy is not wrong because of the intention of the woman who is impregnated, but because of the nature of the act itself.
A hypothetical will help to see why this is the case. Suppose a woman and her husband go through the IVF procedure and find that the woman will never be able to carry a child to term. She approaches her sister and tells her that they still have three “extra” embryos that are destined for destruction and asks if she would be willing to rescue one of them by offering her womb to carry the child. She tells her that it would not be surrogacy, but “embryo fostering” because she is simply fostering the child for 9 months. Verbal gymnastics aside, this clearly fits the definition of surrogacy, an action that the Church has always condemned surrogacy as an intrinsically evil act because it is an offense “against the unity of marriage and the dignity of the procreation of the human person.” In other words, no matter how good the intention is, it can never be deemed morally licit. Likewise, embryo adoption suffers a similar fate.
Surrogacy and the Rights of Spouses
Understanding why surrogacy is wrong will help to see why embryo rescue is not a real moral solution. Notice that Donum Vitae said surrogacy was an offense, not against the procreative aspect of marriage, but the unitive. A woman should only become a mother through her husband. He has an exclusive right to her procreative powers and faculties. When those powers are exercised without him, then the unitive good of marriage has been harmed. She is a mother of the child, but her husband is in no way the father. He neither had a hand in creating the child nor in its gestation (both of which a biological father does even in utero). He may become the child’s adoptive father when it is born, but until then he is not a father.
The unitive good of marriage is maintained when husband and wife must become parents through each other. Even in the case of adoption, they become parents together and not independently of each other. This is why we should hesitate to call embryo rescue, adoption. This solution then introduces a new injustice, mainly against the husband’s exclusive rights to his wife’s procreative faculties. This is ultimately why the Church has said this is “a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (Dignitatis Personae, 19).
What can be done about this then? For the time being we have an obligation to keep the children already in existence alive until a solution can be found. This form of embryo adoption by which someone keeps the child from being terminated or subject to scientific testing would be laudable. When St. John Paul II spoke on the topic he made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”(quoted in Dignitatis Personae, 19). Putting an end to this sanitized barbarism then should be our primary goal.