Photo credit: The National Catholic Bioethics Center
Although most people disdain scholarly material, especially after woke ideology infected academia, this volume collects genuine scholarship for those who want to understand the ethical issues surrounding embryo adoption.
Worthy enough to be a semester-long Ethics course, faculty will want to assign Human Embryo Adoption for their students because it is an engaging and fair pro/con treatment of the issues. Students will appreciate the engaging and readable perspectives on the issues, as well as scholarly documentation in footnotes, an extensive 46 page bibliography, and a thorough index.
Moreover, at $34.95, the volume is well worth purchasing, if only because the reader could prevent him- or herself from compiling, as I have done, twelve pages of notes after text-to-talking 5,259 words of annotations and memorable quotes. The volume can be purchased here: https://www.ncbcenter.org/store/human-embryo-adoption-vol-2-catholic-arguments-for-and-against.
The relevance of this work should be obvious. As of 2024, there are more than 1,000,000 frozen embryos stored throughout the nation (x), or, as Smith colorfully defines the “excess embryos” thus stored: “we should speak of ‘unborn children produced artificially and then abandoned by their mothers’ or ‘tiny human persons stuck in a freezer who need to be gestated and need suitable people to love and raise them’” (295).
What should one do with these unborn human beings? The philosophers whose essays are collected in this volume offer specific solutions, ranging from a proposal that reads as heartless but is cogently argued to another option consistent with Jewish and Christian life-affirming principles.
For example, Alexander argues for two remedies: “I will address in detail the remaining moral options for the situation of frozen embryos: (1) leaving them in their frozen state and (2) thawing them and allowing them to die naturally” (152). An even more seemingly callous remark about the future of frozen embryos comes from Pacholczyk: “Perhaps after a few hundred or a few thousand years, all the embryos would be unable to be thawed, since their lives would have ended spontaneously during their time in their frozen orphanages” (149).
Unfortunately, the anti-embryo adoption essayists represented in this volume seem to be more focused on opposing, rightfully, in vitro fertilization, since that reproductive technology corrupts the purposes and function of sex between husband and wife. Focusing on IVF, however, often obscures recognizing that the child created through that immoral practice is innocent of his or her parents’ or surrogates’ actions.
Pacholczyk seems to have a concern for the child created by IVF obscured by his focus on opposing the means by which the child was created: “certain kinds of actions, like IVF, are so disordered at the core of the choice being made that they result in a situation where many of the consequences not only are extremely serious but are, morally speaking, likely to be incapable of being reversed” (126). He concludes that “As an exceptionless norm, this means that under no circumstances would embryo implantation, as a way of initiating pregnancy, ever be morally permissible, regardless of motivating factors or good intentions” (128-9).
One instance of Pacholczyk’s acknowledgment of the unborn child is a welcome addition to his argument, although it is offered in connection with a clever yet much too subjective comment on the father’s ejaculation:
Under normal circumstances in married life, prior to the birth of a newborn, the father is incidental to practically everything except the conjugal act itself, while his wife does all the heavy lifting of undergoing significant bodily changes and carrying the pregnancy. In the case of embryo adoption, meanwhile, the man becomes entirely incidental to the whole nine-month-long prenatal enterprise. His one, all-important link to his child, the causal link through spousal bodily union, has now been severed. (141)
While the above could generate many possible jokes, the fathers in the audience would seriously recoil at the suggestion that the importance of their fatherhood has been depreciated, if not reduced, to ten seconds of multiple squirts of semen.
I fail to see how such philosophical statements help the unborn child who had the misfortune to be created through IVF.
Other anti-embryo adoption authors provide insights which are much more persuasive. Alexander, for example, notes that
cryopreservation does further damage to the embryonic children by exposing them to destructive manipulation and experimentation as victims of great moral evil—not unlike the Nazis’ imprisonment of human persons and their highly unethical experiments on them. Embryonic children are prisoners of war—the culture war—over the personal meaning of human sexuality and the dignity of the human person. (157)
Most essayists, however, realize that intervention is not only possible, but morally proper and, in several instances, required by pro-life persons, especially Christians. Even anti-embryo adoption essayists have made a case for their opponents, as Bobier’s syllogism suggests: “If embryos are human beings, and opponents of abortion should be proponents of adoption, then opponents of abortion should be proponents of embryonic adoption” (63).
Overall, the essayists advocating embryo adoption are more persuasive. For example, Moschella compares embryo adoption with postnatal adoption, for
embryo adoption, like infant adoption, involves no additional injustice to the child but, on the contrary, seeks insofar as possible to remedy the harms resulting from that injustice by incorporating the child into one’s family and providing him with the unconditional parental love he needs in order to flourish. (196; italics in original)
She makes a further compelling point, arguing that
if we really took seriously, the fact that embryos are complete (though immature) human beings, equal in dignity to more mature human beings, there would be no debate about the inherent permissibility of embryo adoption, just as there are no debates about the inherent permissibility of postnatal adoption. (218; italics in original)
Berkman expresses his plea for intervention and rescue of frozen embryos thus: “We must not allow prenatal children who are orphaned to become the proverbial bastards of the century, from whom we turn away in horror because of their parents’ sins” (238).
Finally, to obviate ethical concerns that those who wish to intervene in saving frozen embryos may have, Smith states that, in “the moral permissibility of the rescue of embryonic persons, an important fact is often missed, namely, that such rescue is best understood as a corporal work of mercy justified by the principle of charity” (293). Thus, “those who wish to rescue abandoned human embryos are not responsible for wrongs already done to them. They did not freeze the human embryos; rather, they want to rescue the tiny human persons imprisoned in freezers” (298).
Much more could be noted about the benefits of the volume: essayists’ discussion of the terminology used either to humanize or dehumanize the unborn child whose condition is being a frozen embryo; Catholic documents affirming the value of frozen embryos as unborn children created by God; and the affirmation, pervading the volume, that married persons have the right to enjoy sexual activity to accomplish the two purposes of marriage (to unite themselves in loving, sexual activity and to remain open to the possibility of having that love lead to new life).
Students, therefore, who must write term papers on what for some is a controversial topic would discover great material in this volume.