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What Do We Do With Them Now?

EMBRYO ADOPTION NOT A CATHOLIC ALTERNATIVE

By James McCoy

This time mankind, playing the sorcerer's apprentice, has engineered an enormity: hundreds of thousands of human embryos with no womb in which to live. More than a hundred thousand languish in liquid nitrogen in the U.S. alone. Can nothing be done?

"We're looking for the principles that might cover this enormity we've created," said John Neumayr, a doctor of theology and a teacher at Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula. So it's no surprise if the alternatives proposed so far turn out to be, damned if you do, damned if you don't. Last month, the Mission looked at Christian Adoption and Family Services agency in Brea which has begun an embryo adoption program, the first of its kind. The agency, while Christian in orientation, is not Catholic; what is the Catholic take on embryo adoption?

Unfortunately, the Church's magisterium has yet to issue an explicit teaching on embryo adoption. The Vatican paper L'Osservatore Romano did have a February 1996 column on what to do with frozen embryos, occasioned by Great Britain's immanent destruction of 9,000 embryos whose time was up according to that nation's law. "According to London sources," wrote Father Gino Concetti, the author of the article, "there are four possibilities for their fate: (1) to continue preserving them in suitable containers; (2) to request their respective parents to reclaim them; or (3) to offer them--on request--to childless couples who wish to have children.

"There is another radically deplorable possibility: (4) to consign the embryos to death or improper use." Father Concetti ruled the last out (Great Britain, in the end, embraced destroying them). The first does not solve the problem, he said; it merely postpones it. "The second hypothesis, 'reclamation' by the parents, is less in contradiction to the moral order.... The parents would only be...fulfilling the obligation to bring to term the life of a human being whom they brought into existence with their biological contribution and consent, to allow its total development and give it a name, family and education." Even then, Father Concetti did not say that the parents would do well, but that which was "less in contradiction to the moral order."

Concetti said that the third option "causes perplexity and reservations. From the legal standpoint, while provision has been made for the adoption and care of children and infants, nothing is envisaged for in vitro embryos." Yet JoAnn Davidson, spokeswoman for Christian Adoption's "Snowflakes" program, does not envisage any legal hassles for the embryo adoption program, even though parents will be genetically unrelated to their babies. Her medical counterpart at Huntington Reproductive Center in Pasadena, Gayle Norbryhn, a nurse practitioner, also downplayed potential custody battles. The law has come to treat a married couple seeking a baby through IVF similar to a couple taking out a mortgage on a house, Norbryhn said; they must sign papers up front delineating who gets the property in the event of a divorce.

Father Concetti did not indicate if, in addition to legal problems, there were moral ones with embryo adoption. He was more intent on calling for a sweeping moratorium on the creation of any new embryos through in-vitro fertilization, saying that "this apparent blind alley has its solution right at the source. In the document Donum Vitae ("The Gift of Life"), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith established certain principles that should be recalled."

Unfortunately, that document, while comprehensive, also does not explicitly address the question of embryo adoption: is it moral to rescue frozen embryos by adoption? (It does address the question of "surrogate motherhood," but more on that later.) What are the basic principles of Donum? I asked Dr. Neumayr, who teaches moral theology and natural law philosophy at Thomas Aquinas College, to explain.

"I thought basically it argued that the conjugal act is per se fertile--so it must always be done in view of its being per se fertile, even though you may know, per accidens, that it might fail," he said. Neumayr, who once played basketball as an undergrad at Notre Dame, Indiana, used this analogy: "When a basketball player is trying to make a free throw, two things are involved: Even though he's trying to make the basket, he might not execute it. That's called 'missing the basket.' It's another thing if he intends to miss: that's called 'throwing the game.'"

["Contra"]Contraception is the moral equivalent of throwing the game; but what does that got to do with conception, conception through in vitro fertilization? "That's the part that's harder for people to see," Neumayr replied, "but I think it's brought out in the instruction. Since the emission of the seed [the sperm and the ovum] is for the generation of the offspring, even the way it's generated is for the benefit of the offspring. It's better for him that he be of the flesh of the mother and of the father, and not to come about by some unnatural or violent act, but by the natural marital act."

When Neumayr spoke of "violent," he meant a "'violent' as opposed to the 'natural' act." "Heavy things fall naturally," he said, "but if they're hurled upwards, that's a 'violent' action.'" Neumayr said that in-vitro fertilization is a violent action because, "in the first place, it's depriving the offspring of its natural generation, which brings with it the things pertaining to its nurturing and development.... It's hard to say all the things that can go wrong, if you don't go this way...."

For example, Neumayr said, take hyperovulation: the production of dozens of ova by manmade hormones. It's "hyper," and so it goes beyond the limit which nature intended. "In fact, it's mutilation," Neumayr said. "Health is a kind of limit, as Aristotle said. Once you've arrived at the point [of health], if you go beyond it, you make a person sick. If you suppress ovulation or induce hyperovulation, you take it [fertility] beyond the natural limit; then you've taken a healthy organ and made it unhealthy, which is a form of mutilation." Neumayr hastened to add, however, that "if there's a woman who needs the pill to regulate, to come back to the natural order" that would be medicinal, not immoral. "The Church is calling us back to that kind of fine point," Neumayr went on, "that even here in the act of generation things will go wrong down the line if we do it in a violent way."

No clearer reductio ad absurdum to in-vitro fertilization could be deduced than this fact: it has produced thousands of "spare" embryos who are "exposed to an absurd fate," as Donum Vitae puts it.

"Just to create those embryos was a grave wrong," Neumayr said. "That's the way the instruction seems to read. Once they exist, however, they do exist as human beings and persons; and making the best of the situation means not destroying them--which would be murder."

Indeed, the instruction says that it's "not in conformity with the moral law deliberately to expose to death human embryos in vitro. In consequence of the fact that they have been produced in vitro, those embryos which are not transferred to the body of the mother and are called 'spare' are exposed to an absurd fate, with no possibility of their being offered safe means of survival which can be licitly pursued]."

That last emphasis is neither the instruction's nor mine. It was stressed by Monsignor William Smith, a noted moral theologian and professor at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, New York when I asked him about embryo adoption. "I really don't think that's a licit procedure," he said. "Donum Vitae didn't answer that precise question. But my judgment is negative.

"Adoption is a perfectly licit procedure," Monsignor Smith went on. The problem with embryo adoption, however, is it's not adoption: "It's stretching the notion of 'adoption' to the breaking point," he said. "What you really have is a form of surrogate motherhood," and that, Donum Vitae says, is not morally licit.

Under the question, "Is surrogate motherhood morally licit?" the instruction replies, "No...for it is contrary to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person. Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents..."

What Donum Vitae terms a "surrogate mother" is what Norbryhn at Huntington Reproductive calls a "gestational carrier." She explained that a "gestational carrier isn't genetically related at all to the life she's carrying." Some couples at the clinic create a human embryo with their own gametes but then hire another woman to carry him to birth. An adoptive mother would not be carrying a embryo for money, but for love; the matching of genetic parents and the adoptive parents in "Snowflakes" even takes into account religious belief, and thus goes far beyond the usual concerns that the gestational carrier be of sound health, etc.

But essentially, I asked Norbryhn, an adoptive mother is a gestational carrier? Yes, she agreed.

Dr. Neumayr agreed with Monsignor Smith that Donum Vitae rules out embryo adoption, implicitly though not explicitly. "I'm not against adoption," Neumayr also said. "In a way it fortifies the natural good of procreation: adoptive parents are parents in the most serious way because they form the soul of the child. So in a very essential way they're the parents." But when it comes to adopting a child via in-vitro fertilization, the end doesn't justify the means. "The instruction seems to say, basically, 'no,'" Neumayr said.

Then Catholics can do nothing to help these frozen human beings? The question is especially pointed because they cannot live in liquid nitrogen indefinitely. Experience with other frozen cells shows that after a certain number of years--perhaps ten, no one is exactly sure how many--no frozen embryo will survive.

"Why not baptize them?" Neumayr asked. "Do the first things first. if you know they're going to die given a certain amount of time, the first thing is to baptize them."

Faced with an enormity, it's not surprising if the sacrament of Baptism, which normally involves pouring water on a born human being and saying the words "N., I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" doesn't exactly "fit." Nevertheless, Catholics should do what they can sacramentally, Neumayr said, "and God will supply the rest."

I asked Norbryhn about the technical difficulties of baptizing a frozen embryo. For one thing, it would be impossible to sprinkle water directly on a frozen embryo; the sudden shift in temperature would kill him instantly. You could pour water on the liquid nitrogen canister containing the embryos without harming them, Norbryhn allowed, but then "you're baptizing everybody's embryos" (a canister contains scores of "straws"; each straw contains several frozen embryos). "If you throw water on the straw, you'll kill them. Probably the only way it might be done," she replied after thinking about it for a minute, "since a computer controls the thawing process, is when you thaw them from the straw into the petrie dish--it might be possible to sprinkle water on the petrie dish. So they would have had to have thawed already."

Yet in the thawing process, at least a third of the embryos are likely to die--without being baptized yet. Neumayr ruled out any administration of baptism which would necessitate any embryo's death either before, during or after the sacrament. "You might be able to do something exterior to them," he said. "Of course the verbal formality might be there. The matter [pouring water] would not be there or be incomplete.... But the words are there, and in a sense they're more important."

The main thing, the hopeful thing, Neumayr maintained, is that "the Church can baptize people who wouldn't intend it for themselves." This is clear in her teaching on infant Baptism where parents are the "vicars" or representative of their child, supplying the intention of becoming a Christian for him. Even if parents did not want to get involved in the Baptism of their frozen embryos, "the formal rite would supply the desire of the vicar," Neumayr said, "and God will supply the rest."

What about the fact that it might not be possible to baptize frozen embryos individually? Can you say, "I baptize you all...."? "It wouldn't strain the language to take the plural and add extra words that don't take away from the formula," Neumayr said. "Even in the Mass priests add words that don't take away from the formula."

Again, "we're looking for the principles that might cover this enormity man has created," Neumayr stressed. Baptism is "worth doing," he summed up, "but the remaining problem is, what do you do with them after that?"

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