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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The U.S. government says embryos aren't "donated" to infertile couples -- they're "adopted." How language has become a front line in the abortion wars.
Feb 5, 2005 | Last year -- for the second time -- the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services gave away nearly $1 million in grants to promote awareness of embryo donation, a fertility procedure wherein a couple's embryo is implanted in a woman's womb and, assuming the pregnancy takes, raised as her child. Such embryos are normally donated by couples whose in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure (in which the egg and the sperm are combined outside the body and then implanted) has yielded more embryos than they intend to make use of. Rather than keeping the embryos frozen indefinitely, offering them to fertility researchers or disposing of them, the donor couple -- either anonymously or in an "open" process -- makes them available to a woman who can, in many senses, give them a good home. The appeal of impregnation with a donor embryo includes the relatively low cost -- thousands of dollars as opposed to tens of thousands of dollars with a donor egg -- along with the experience of pregnancy. "I can't afford to use eggs," says Kim Bell, 40, of Howard Beach, N.Y., who is currently searching online message boards for an embryo donor. Embryo donation, she says, "would give me a chance to nurture the baby from the very start."
Embryo donation has been medically available, though not widely used, since the 1980s. A 2003 Harris poll commissioned by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, and funded in part by a 2002 HHS grant, found that 75 percent of people diagnosed with infertility who had considered treatment believed that they did not have enough information about embryo donation to make an informed decision about whether to try it. IVF clinics currently offer a patchwork of embryo-donation information and services, and the number of wait-listed would-be recipients far exceeds donor-embryo supply. Hence the effort to "promote awareness."
Now, however, this personal reproductive decision is also becoming -- with the switch of just one word -- political. HHS, along with some of the organizations it supports with funding, explicitly calls the process embryo "adoption."
"There's no such thing as embryo 'adoption,'" says Sean Tipton, spokesperson for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "You adopt a child. Embryo donation is a donation of medical tissue, like sperm or an egg. The groups that advocate 'adoption' have a vastly different and rather transparent political agenda. [They] have a very high political stake in establishing that a fertilized egg is a human being with legal rights and moral standing."
Most people who believe that embryos can be adopted, even symbolically, believe that embryos are children, or even, in the words of one conservative columnist writing in favor of embryo adoption, "microscopic Americans." And, the logic follows, if embryos are mini-children, they shouldn't be mined for stem cells -- which they can't be anyway, given the limits President Bush imposed in 2001-- or lost to abortion.
"The attempt to change the vocabulary around embryos is part of a larger strategy to elevate the fetus to 'personhood' under the 14th Amendment -- and an effort to overturn Roe," says Suzanne Martinez, vice president for public policy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The imposition of the term "embryo adoption," she says, goes hand in hand with other ongoing efforts to confer personhood on embryos and fetuses: laws that make it a separate criminal offense to harm a fetus, for example, or government insurance plans that cover "an individual in the period between conception and birth up to age 19." What do those have to do specifically with Roe vs. Wade? Though the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion turns largely on the right to privacy, it also notes -- in an aside that has become anything but -- if fetuses were "people," they would be entitled to protection under the 14th Amendment, and abortion would still be illegal. The Center for Women Policy Studies has stated that "legislative efforts to establish fetal patienthood, victimhood and, therefore, personhood represent the primary threat to Roe v. Wade."
