Infertility patients caught in legal, moral, scientific embryo debate

[bliss_eternal]

Infertility patients caught in the legal, moral and scientific embryo debate

Tough decisions about what to do with unused embryos lead to a bigger question: When does life begin?

By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 6, 2008



Six years of frustration and heartbreak. That's how Gina Rathan recalls her attempts to become pregnant.

Finally, she and her husband, Cheddi, conceived a daughter, now 3, through in vitro fertilization. About a year later, she became pregnant with a second child, naturally. Their family was complete.


Then, a year ago, the Fountain Valley couple received a bill reminding them that their infertility journey wasn't quite over. They owed $750 to preserve three frozen embryos they'd created but hadn't used.

"I don't see them as not being life yet," says Gina Rathan, 42, a pharmaceutical sales representative. "I thought, 'How can I discard them when I have a beautiful child from that IVF cycle?' "

Many other former infertility patients also appear to be grappling over the fate of embryos they have no plans to use: An estimated 500,000 embryos are in cryopreservation in the United States.


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Colorado voters will decide in November whether to amend the state's constitution to assert that an embryo is a person. Indiana lawmakers have proposed legislation that would allow abandoned embryos to be adopted for implantation by another couple. New Jersey legislators have moved to allow unused embryos to become wards of the state. And Georgia and West Virginia are considering legislation that would give embryos "personhood" status.

Although these proposals are sponsored in large part by abortion opponents, infertility patients nationwide -- whose feelings about abortion run the gamut -- are finding themselves ensnared in a debate about when life begins.

"They are in the middle of this ideological war, although they may not be aware they are in the middle of a war," says Renee Whitley, co-chairwoman of the national advocacy committee for Resolve, an organization supporting people with infertility. "This is the politics of embryos."

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read more at:
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-embryos6-2008oct06,0,4090965.story

[ismnotwasm]

1. Gawd

A frozen embryo "a person"

Here's some more news on this topic


Feminist Daily News Wire
October 23, 2008
Opposition Strong Against Colorado's Egg=Person Amendment

Recent polling for The Denver Post shows that 48 percent of Colorado's citizens plan to vote No on Amendment 48, a November ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to define a fertilized, unimplanted human egg as a full person with all civil rights. Thirty percent of the electorate supports it, and 22 percent of the electorate remains undecided.

Such "personhood" initiatives are thinly veiled attempts to ban all abortion rights, also threatening women's ability to access oral and emergency contraception, IUDs, in-vitro fertilization and even emergency health care that might put a fertilized egg in danger. By redefining


http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=11351

More and more I like the phrase "maternal moral authority" Every women who carries a fetus should have an individual right, not to be imposed on anyone else for any reason-- legally, ethically or morally-- exactly she considers the state of the fetus to be. I don't believe forced birth women understand what they're given up with their acquiescence to a male dominated culture, or by imposing their personal values on other women. It's one step closer to losing their own "personhood".

These women don't understand that at one time we were considered barely human and if human flawed copies of males. Or they choose to ignore it. Or, even worse, believe it to be true.