WASHINGTON — Robert Edwards was credited this week for some 4 million people that would not exist today were it not for a groundbreaking technique he developed.
But others pointed to the untold numbers of embryos that perished and hundreds of thousands in frozen preservation because of it.
It was announced Oct. 4 that Edwards would receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The British biologist and clinician, with his physician colleague Patrick Steptoe, developed in vitro fertilization.
Louise Brown — the world’s first “test-tube baby,” born in 1978 — applauded Edwards’ achievement. But Catholic bioethicists and some researchers and clinicians challenged the Nobel Prize Committee’s decision to honor Edwards, noting that his innovation resulted in the destruction of millions of human embryos and ushered in a “brave new world” of anonymous sperm donors and “surrogate mothers.”
While honoring one of the inventors of in vitro fertilization with the Nobel Prize for Medicine recognizes his contribution to human reproduction, it ignores the ethical consequences of his opening “the wrong door” in the fight against infertility, said the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Msgr. Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said he recognized that Edwards “ushered in a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction in which the best results are visible to everyone, beginning with Louise Brown.”
However, “without Edwards there wouldn’t be a market for oocytes (immature egg cells), without Edwards there wouldn’t be freezers full of embryos waiting to be transferred in utero or, more likely, to be used for research or to die abandoned and forgotten by everyone,” the monsignor said in a written statement released by the Vatican Press Office Oct. 4.
The written statement came after Msgr. Carrasco spoke with the Italian news agency, ANSA, and said the Nobel committee’s selection of Edwards was “completely out of place.”
“Awarding a Nobel Prize to the scientist who made it possible to create human children in a dish reflects our culture’s questionable moral commitments,” said Stephen Napier, an ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. “Children should be the result of a loving act between a husband and wife. Instead, the IVF industry has left us with thousands of frozen children — approximately 500,000 at last count.”
A slew of commentators suggested that early ethical concerns regarding IVF centered on whether laboratory fertilization could produce healthy babies, which has largely been resolved. But critics argue that IVF raises a host of issues — moral, medical, cultural and financial — that still haven’t received adequate public scrutiny.
Elizabeth Marquardt, a social researcher and author based at the Institute for American Values, notes that news stories about IVF often focus on the fulfillment of parental dreams, while ignoring a host of inconvenient truths, including websites established by adult children yearning to meet sperm-donor fathers and half siblings.
“Today, those who continue to focus only on the point of view of parents, would-be parents and fertility industry professionals are making a choice to frame IVF and reproductive technologies as an issue of adult rights without regard for the needs of offspring (as children, and when they grow up),” said Marquardt.
Yet the scientific community joined in the public celebration of Edwards’ feat. “Very few scientists can say that 4 million people are alive because of their work, but Robert Edwards is one of those few,” stated a news story posted on the website of Nature, the prestigious science magazine.
Nature described IVF as “a safe technique that is 20%-30% effective.”
Need for Regulation
Experts in the field of assisted fertility technology and embryo-killing stem-cell research acknowledge the critical importance of Edwards’ basic research and clinical trials.
In a 2001 article in Nature, Edwards noted his early delight in the regenerative properties of embryonic stem cells. Decades ago, he reported, he encouraged colleagues at Cambridge University to pursue research with embryonic tissue.
More recently, after President George W. Bush placed limits on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, Edwards suggested that many political leaders in the U.S. and the U.K. had adopted a morally inconsistent stance — given the rapidly expanding field of reproductive technologies that drew little public attention from policymakers.
“Stem-cell ethics are minor when compared with the issues raised by gamete donation, surrogate pregnancy, embryo cryopreservation, research on early human embryos, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and adult cloning,” wrote Edwards.
Yet, Edwards’ defensive posture acknowledged that even as the majority of scientists in his field appeared to have set aside ethical reservations, innovations in reproductive technologies continue to stir public unease.
At present, the public debate centers on lethal stem-cell research and the specter of human cloning — not IVF, which is largely unregulated in the United States.
“It is long past time there was limiting regulation in this field. It was unregulated IVF that led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of ‘excess’ human embryos in cryogenic storage in IVF clinics,” said William Saunders, senior vice president at Americans United for Life. “This tempted scientific entrepreneurs to try to find ways to ‘use this resource.’ This led, in turn, to the tragedy of human embryonic stem-cell research and the possible future specter of the mass production of human beings in the lab, through cloning, for the purpose of being destroyed for research.”
Dr. Thomas Hilgers, director of the Omaha-based Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and developer of pro-life NaPro Technology, believes it is past time for physicians dealing with infertility to re-evaluate their tendency to promote IVF. Instead, he argues, they should treat the medical conditions that lead to infertility.
“IVF is a technology that destroys life to create life. It does not look for or address the underlying causes of infertility. On both counts, it’s the wrong approach and a lot of people have suffered as a result,” said Hilgers, an obstetrician, gynecologist and specialist in reproductive medicine and surgery.
More than three decades after Louise Brown’s birth on the 10th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, notes Hilgers, IVF procedures have yet to exceed a 30% success rate for achieving pregnancy. Still, women are encouraged to pay tens of thousands of dollars for several cycles of treatment and undergo invasive medical procedures.
The brutal truth, said Hilgers, becomes clear in this “mind-blowing statistic”: There are “9.5 million women in the U.S with reproductive problems, and, in a given year, 99.5% of those women will never have a baby using IVF.” For many women, the legacy of their gamble with IVF is “mistrust and regret.”
Primary Opponent
Media accounts of Edwards’ Nobel Prize noted that the Catholic Church remains the primary opponent to IVF and other forms of assisted fertility treatments that create human life outside the marital act.
However, Michael Hanby, assistant professor of biotechnology and culture at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America, notes that the Church’s repudiation of IVF is not solely concerned with the death-dealing that often accompanies a procedure that routinely discards genetically defective embryos and freezes “spare” embryos.
Catholic sexual ethics arises from the Church’s understanding of who and what the human person is, a body-soul unity called to make a total self-gift in love, said Hanby.
“When the Church states that fertility treatment must respect the three fundamental goods of the right to life from conception, the integrity of marriage, and the unity between the conjugal act and its fruitfulness, it is this vision of the human person that underlies and unites these goods,” Hanby noted. “And it is our humanity that is ultimately put in jeopardy by IVF and associated technologies.”
By separating procreation from the conjugal act, Hanby concluded, “IVF divides and reduces the person; love becomes a mere affection or sentiment and the body a mere mechanism subordinate to the designs of the will. And the child conceived via IVF is necessarily treated from the very first not as a child — not as a person and gift with an inviolable being all his own — but as matter to be selected and worked upon.”
Joan Frawley Desmond writes from Chevy Chase, Maryland.
This article was updated on Oct. 12.
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Okay here’s an old adage that has long been forgotten by science: JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN DO SOMETHING DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD!!!!!!!!
How sad to celebrate a technology that will result in a victory for the Culture of Death. Experimentation on human life was condemned when the Nazis practiced it in the death camps. Now, our human race in its utter confusion and lack of moral compass is willing to celebrate such “science.”
In the human family, we all learn to get along with each other. We learn to accept our differences. In the IVF family, we seek perfection, reject imperfection and believe that somehow we are better off when genetic traits that we do not desire in our family are screened out, cast out, destroyed, we are all better off.
Perhaps we can change the Nobel prize title to the Ignoble prize. We are not the Creator. We are not in charge of the propagation of the human race by any method science can cook up. What of the rejected embryos? Are they safe in a testtube outside the confines of their loving family? History says no. God sends us into families for our own protection. We are cherished, loved, cared for in our families. No one protects a test tube reject. They experiment on them. They give “Nobel prizes” to scientists who create messes. Where are the solutions for the problems created by IVF? Who cares? Certainly not the man receiving his Frankenstinian prize.
Laudable? I think not. Reprehensible, irresponsible? You decide.
Yes, let’s dictate who can have a child and who can’t. You’re infertile? Oh well, stinks to be you. Why don’t we just model our government after China and limit how many children a couple can have. For those that can’t tell, this is called sarcasm.
To Maggie: We could do it, we did do it, and it worked.
To One of the Sheep: Stop shoving your morally inconsistent trash you call god down people’s throats. FYI, not everyone has the same belief system as you, and therefore should not have to abide by your guidelines about what is moral. Wasn’t this country founded on the whole freedom of religion deal? If people got rid of religion and it’s bigoted ideals, the world would be a much better place.
What do we expect from these crazy people? They gave Obama the peace prize when he hadn’t done anything….
The Nobel Committee, sadly, is now steeped in politics and the culture of death.
When we think about the ethical dimension, one HUGE and CRITICAL point is lost. IVF frequently involves planned abortions. Multiple embryos are implanted in order to increase odds of success, and when multiple embryos survive in the womb, some of them are aborted.
It is very true, that in addition to the lives in deep freeze liquid nitrogen limbo, there are lives which from the first are planned to be destroyed. The IVF doctors plan on aborting “extras”.
While it is true that as the technology matures this practice is decreasing, it is still the norm.
IVF involves the genesis of many people. One or a few are destined to a full and normal life. Some are, by willful act from the start, destined for limbo (liquid nitrogen storage), or planned abortions.
To Douglas Dobrozsi: I know this, and until we get to the point where one single embryo can be implanted because there is a 99% chance it will take, then this is what has to be done. Personally, I don’t consider a ball of cells a human, so honestly the fact that some are “aborted” doesn’t mean that much to me.
And for those that are wondering, if I was one of those cells, especially when dealing with embryonic stem cell research, and if I had the ability to have feelings, I’d be more than happy to give my 4 day old life to research.
Emily, perhaps the Nazis too thought that Jews, Catholics, and Gypsies must die horrible deaths in medical “research” until they perfected their “medicine” until 99% of the research targets wouldn’t die under their care.
We don’t butcher people as experiments at any stage if we truly love one another.
Would you be willing to give your life NOW in medical research so that others could live? Why do I ask? Because you have the same DNA at 4 days that you do now.
Unless you say yes, then your statement about doing it at 4 days holds no weight.
For those who have never faced infertility, walk in those shoes for a moment. It’s devastating. While I recognize that there are moral issues that surround IVF, it’s primary goal is not to destroy, but to give life. I am currently pregnant due to IVF and I must address some of the arguments against the procedure. Firstly, the reason for my infertility was diagnosed and treated. Despite those efforts, the damage was too severe to make unassisted conception possible. Secondly, our embryo was chosen by the doctors based on an unreliable visual inspection of which looked most viable at the critical moment. There was no genetic testing done on our embryos to choose one with the best genes or specific characteristics. Thirdly, we had only one embryo transferred to my uterus. The “option” of selective abortion was neither raised nor involved. Fourthly, I can’t figure out how my assisted reproduction does not regard the needs of my offspring. Unassisted reproduction can be viewed as equally “selfish” and perhaps more so since a good percentage are often unplanned. Finally, I disagree wholly with the closing paragraph in the article. My husband and I are deeply in love. IVF has not reduced us to “mere affection.” The expression of our love was not enough to have the child we desperately wanted. Additionally, somehow, I’ve been turned into a demi-god who delights in manipulating and controlling the organic matter of potential life. We tried for some time to have a child before we knew I was infertile. My reasons for wanting a child didn’t change simply because I suddenly couldn’t do it on my own. Instead of domination, I feel grateful that this small life has taken hold in my womb. I feel something a little more special has happened and I have Dr. Edwards, Dr. Steptoe, and all the infertile women of past generations to thank for that.
To liseux: You cannot possibly compare however long I have been on this Earth with that of a 4-day old cell. However when I do eventually die, my organs will be able to help those in need. And I can’t believe you would stoop to the level of comparing what the Nazis did to IVF. That is pure naivety and downright stupid. People need to stop equating a ball of cells to an already living being. They are just not the same.
Hello Erin,
While I do not agree with IVF, as a woman experiencing secondary infertility in my own marriage, I do try to understand. I am 48, and would desperately love to have another child. My husband and I have tried for 6 years, but it’s not happening- yet.
I have brought up adoption to my husband, but he is not for it.
You write that you had only one embryo transferred to your uterus. I do know that for efficiency sake, in most cases, multiple embryos are produced by the doctors, because not all are of the quality to transplant.
Do you know how many embryos your doctors created to have the one transplanted?
Joseph, your logic is a bit behind.
If our church wasn’t worried about all the various ways that human embryos are destroyed, then you would not have to be concerned about the jails. They’d be empty, ultimately.
All those men and women on death row were once embryos, fetuses, and neonates whose lives deserved protection then, and now.
Thank God the Catholic Church values life at degrees, not just those that we can see in front of us and are convenient.
Emily, yes I can compare your life now to your life when you were that 4-day old blastocyst, because no matter how much you kick and scream (and try to insult) you had the same DNA then and now.
Isn’t science great!
Kill you at 4 days conception or kill you at 40 yrs. old, you’re still nonexistent. That is not progress, that is preying on the weak and the vulnerable to profit the strong. Might does not make right.
Thank God there are still people and institutions that value human live at all stages of development.
To liseux: Your naivety is scary.
Emily, I am a realist.
Had you given your life at 4 days or at 40 years, you would not exist, which would be a shame, as all life has dignity and infinite value.
To liseux: That’s not realism. That’s ignorance and a lack of knowledge of basic physiology.
Emily, please demonstrate how you had a different genetic code at 4 days than you will at 40 years of age.
I am not saying I have a different genetic code. What is ignorant is the fact that you feel that you can compare a 4 day old ball of cells to however long I have been here on Earth. Those are so far from being the same thing, it’s ridiculous.
And the physiology part: Just because something has the potential to be something, or do something, does not mean we should value it more than what is already something or has already done something. Just because there’s the potential for an earthquake, does that mean we should be scared 24/7? If someone has the potential to be a neurosurgeon, does that mean we should let him/her perform brain surgery before they are capable? This ties in with embryonic stem cell research.
But I will give you credit on being consistent.
Hello Joseph,
I’d rather read what YOU have to say than a link to a website.
So what do you have in mind?
Hello Emily,
Thanks for conceding that you as a 4-day old blastocyst and at a 40-yr. old lady have the same genetic code.
You were also genetically COMPLETE at 4 days old, meaning that all genetic information you needed to develop further was there.
Just like when you were 14, you were still genetically COMPLETE, but you were not through developing.
Using your logic, you could also be killed at 14, but because you’re not through developing to your “potential,” you’re not a human being worthwile to keep around.
If you were eliminated at 4 days, 14 years, or 40 years of age, you’re still eliminated.
No more Emily. Gone, kaput, never more.
FYI, hurling insults is the first indicator that someone has no substantial evidence to support her argument. I hope that’s not the case with you.
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