I am very much in favor of regulation of the Artificial Reproductive Technology industry (preferably federal regulation to prevent a “race to the bottom” among states). However, such regulation is necessary because there is huge market demand for making ART as efficient as possible in producing a baby. Particularly in the use of hormones to increase egg production and the egg extraction, women have to give informed consent, and millions of them have made the trade off between their own health and their desire to have a biological child ASAP. As I want to adopt kids, I find this trade off rather mysterious, but it certainly exists and is expressed in what the ART market offers customers. If there is a strong political movement for such regulation, it wasn’t making much noise when I was studying bioethics six years ago.

Kevin,

We may be having a grammatical disagreement: I follow the traditional view that any two things that are identical inherently can’t be “unique.” See American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of unique: “Being the only one of its kind… Usage Note: For many grammarians, unique is the paradigmatic absolute term, a shibboleth that distinguishes between those who understand that such a term cannot be modified by an adverb of degree or a comparative adverb and those who do not. These grammarians would say that a thing is either unique or not unique and that it is therefore incorrect to say that something is very unique or more unique than something else.”

If a set of DNA has been replicated in another person, then it no longer is unique because it no longer is the only one of its kind. Therefore it is a strategic error for abortion prohibitionists to dwell so much on uniqueness of its DNA as what makes the fertilized egg deserving of the full dignity of the status of a person. In addition to leaving identical twins in a bizarre position with regard to personhood, there’s the problem of cloning that you identify, in which DNA has been deliberately replicated (although clones are significantly less identical than identical twins, because only the nuclear DNA is replicated while mitochondrial DNA is different). I don’t see “unique DNA” as necessary, much less sufficient, for personhood.

If fertilized eggs are children, then under every state law of which I am aware, there are significant legal hurdles to having the excess children given to other people. Many people pursue fertility treatments precisely because they find the hurdles to adoption so onerous. Adoption is expensive and invasive of privacy. If every couple who implanted another couple’s fertilized egg/ child were required to undergo the same procedures as people who seek to adopt a born child, I suspect you would see a massive decline in such “snowflake” adoptions.

Rox’s suggestion that couples implant zygotes within a certain time period or have them adopted by another couple speaks to the peculiar personhood status that frozen embryos have. Do you think that leaving a person in a freezer for an indefinite number of years, with that person potentially “spoiling” in the sense of no longer being viable for implantation, fully respects that person’s rights?

Moreover, fertility clinics certainly won’t want the legal liability that personhood status for fertilized eggs would imply. Already they are on the hook for civil liability in any negligence that leads to the loss of fertilized eggs, but that’s just a matter of property law; the clinic has to pay money for the loss of things. If fertilized eggs are people, a fertility clinic that negligently kills the eggs, say by having a backup generator fail to work when there is an area power failure, will become criminally liable for negligent homicide. Indeed, as children, fertilized eggs presumably are in the physical custody and control of the clinic (even if legal custody remains with the parents), which imposes tremendous responsibilities on the clinic to care for the children.

Roxeanne - You’re more than welcome to keep blogging here!

You would not be required to think less of identical twins than you currently do, unless you are somehow required to think less of clones. After all, that’s all identical twins are. Natural clones. Their DNA is still unique and viable - there will just be twice as much of it someday!

Kevin’s last blog post..Achmadinijihad Could Actually Pull This Off

There may be ways to change the IVF practises without actually mandating that women carry all of the embryos at once. My top choice would be to harvest fewer eggs, because the egg harvesting procedure (with the overdoses of hormones, used to extract as many eggs as possible) can have serious side effects for a woman.

Additionally, fertility clinics could have their patients make a choice with the embryos: implant within a specified time period, or put up for “snowflake adoption.”

Even without a Human Life Amendment, these are things that should be done. We acknowledge that there are bioethical issues with harvesting eggs from women and dealing with excess human embryos. This isn’t necessarily a pro-life/pro-choice issue - it’s an issue of human dignity and safe medical practise.

Tieki - there’s so much awesomeness out West, and it’s so big, that you can take it all in going 75 mph.

75 mph * 6 hours = 450 miles. Going 55 mph = about 8.5 hours. Yuck. You would just never get anywhere.

For me, law school to home was 10 hours if I slightly ignored the speed limit (did about 70 the whole way). I once did it in nine, and I was flying (made the first 260 miles in just over three hours). 55 mph - no freakin way. It would go from a 10 hour drive to a 12 or 13 hour drive.

Great post… very, very sad and horrible situation.

It does seem a bit backwards in some ways… driving 55 out east is torture because there’s nothing to look at and everybody’s mean… but maybe people should drive a little slower out west to take in the pure awesomeness.

That said, what is now a 6 hour drive from my house to Denver going about 75-80 on average would be insanely long at 55 mph. I don’t do math, but I’m pretty sure that would up the trip by an hour or two.

I truly don’t believe that a zygote is a person. If I thought the pre-condition for personhood was having a unique set of DNA, I’d have to think that identical twins were somehow less of persons because their DNA isn’t unique — it’s identical.

The reason the phrase “fertilized egg” is used is to emphasize that IVF also would become very difficult and more expensive under a law that declared all zygotes to be persons. Suppose Louise Brown’s parents had lived in Colorado under this law. After having Mrs. Brown’s eggs extracted and Mr. Brown’s sperm extracted, they would not be able to combine sperm with more than one egg at a time unless the Browns said they were willing to undertake a multiple-child pregnancy and delivery. (Such a pregnancy is worse for the health of both mother and children than a single-child pregnancy; each twin generally will have a lower birth weight than he would have done had he been a single pregnancy, and carrying and delivering twins is harder on their mother’s body.) Because zygotes are declared people under the Colorado law, couples who are interested in IVF could not simply put these people on ice, as parents who are unwilling to dispose of excess zygotes currently do. If the zygote is actually a child, then every couple willing to be implanted with another couple’s excess zygotes would have to undergo adoption procedures.

I find it far more common for pro-life people not to actually want to treat zygotes the same way they would treat an infant, than for pro-choice people to believe that a zygote should be treated the same as an infant except with regard to abortion.