In Mississippi, the Supreme Court approved a ballot initiative that, if successful, would define a fertilized egg as a human being. Specifically, if approved by the voters, the new law reads“The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”
I blogged about this topic previously in the post “Reproductive Bills in the News” when Oklahoma tried (and failed) to pass a similar bill. There are two problems with this legislation. First, it is based on assumptions about embryo biology that are not accurate. In order for a human being to be equivalent by definition to a fertilized egg, every fertilized egg must ultimately result in a living human. Those of us who work with human embryos every day know that many fertilized eggs do not result in human beings and that embryos can fail to continue their biological path at steps both early or late, before and after implantation in the uterus. Embryos routinely fail to cleave into multi-cellular organisms and can stay at the 2PN (fertilized egg) stage until they deteriorate. If they cleave once, there is no guarantee that they will cleave a second or third or thousandth time.
Furthermore, it is possible for an egg to start to divide after being chemically activated or stimulated by the intrusion of an additional sperm, both events that create embryos that are destined to end in failure, never ultimately creating any recognizable human being by any currently accepted definition. Yet these dividing embryos with no potential would be defined as “human beings”by this bill because it doesn’t even require normal fertilization but allows “cloning or equivalent thereof” to satisfy the requirements of fertilization.
The second problem with these attempts to define fertilized eggs as human beings is due to “unintended consequences” on current medical treatments. For instance, normally fertilized eggs that implant in the Fallopian tube instead of the uterus can not result in a living human because the embryos developmental program is doomed to fail if the embryo is not in the uterus. But before it fails, an embryo growing in the Fallopian tube will often cause a rupture of the tube and possibly fatal unstoppable bleeding in the pregnant woman.
The only treatment for this deadly medical condition (ectopic pregnancy) is to sacrifice the embryo by removing it (and often the tube) or by causing the embryo’s demise and reabsorption by the body by administering a cytotoxin. Remember that the ectopically growing embryo is doomed regardless of whether it’s mother lives or dies but if this embryo is legally a person, current treatments to save the mother would be legally defined as murder, not medicine, and the mother would be doomed to die as well. Surely this is not what the citizens of Mississippi want?
Other possible repercussions from passage of these personhood laws is that common in vitro fertilization procedures would likely not be legal. High pregnancy rates currently enjoyed by US IVF patients are due in large part to the fact that multiple eggs are recruited, fertilized and allowed to grow in vitro to a relatively advanced blastocyst stage, at which point the embryo is ready to successfully implant in the uterus. Having more fertilized eggs to start with than you are willing to transfer allows selection of the most robust embryos which increases the pregnancy rate. Ironically, medical treatments such as IVF which are designed to create human beings when other avenues to reproduction are closed could very well be rendered illegal by these so-called “pro-life” personhood laws.
Excess embryos are created along the way in the current medical practice of IVF. These excess embryos are typically frozen for possible future use. Some of these frozen embryos may be ultimately discarded once the patient’s family is complete. If every embryo is arbitrarily defined as a human being, I expect that patients would lose the right to discard excess embryos because how do you “discard” a human being? You can’t. Patients would have to cryopreserve them forever, making estate plans to continue cryopreservation and storage for generations after the originators of the embryos are deceased. There is no known “expiration date” for frozen embryos. In Italy, where restrictions on IVF limit the number of eggs that can be fertilized to three and do not allow embryo freezing (only egg freezing), pregnancy rates are much lower than the average rates in the US because there is no natural selection of the most robust embryos for transfer.
Lab accidents causing the unfortunate demise of an embryo such as accidentally dropping a dish, failure of a freezing tank or simply routine culling of non-clinical (abnormally fertilized) embryos could all be re-classified as a kind of manslaughter under this redefinition of fertilized egg as person.
The article “Will Mississipi Ban IVF?” by Michelle Goldberg discusses the possible impact of personhood amendments on how IVF is conducted (or banned) in Mississippi. Personhood USA, a political group is trying to get similar measures on ballots in Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Florida, Oregon, and Ohio. In the US, we have historically put a high premium on patient autonomy and held sacred the physician-patient relationship. Should our government be able to dictate the most personal reproductive decisions that its citizens’ make? In my humble opinion, laws that arbitrarily restrict medical practice and patient autonomy while preventing life-saving treatments really have no place in the United States.
© 2011, Fertility Lab Insider. All rights reserved.
©2011 Fertility Lab Insider. All Rights Reserved.
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