This is a rare midweek piece, because I couldn’t hold this till Sunday.
Back in January or February of 2002, my fertility doctor harvested 24 eggs from my ovaries.
This did not surprise me. Months of injections, sweats, barely contained anger, mood swings, and all other manner of hormonal indignities led me to believe that the treatment was working.
The fertility folks were excited. They had never seen that many eggs!
I’ve always been an overachiever.
Those 24 eggs were turned into 23 embryos. No idea what happened to the one.
Now, 23 embryos is a lot to put into a person, and if I had put in more than, say, four, and they had all attached to my uterus, then people would have tut-tutted that I had too many kids and I couldn't afford them.
I mean, look how we attacked the Octomom.
So we froze 10, picked the best three out of the 13 left, and implanted them. The day we were moving into our new house in Flossmoor, Illinois, I found out I was not pregnant.
We had this big house, in the middle of a suburb that looks like a park, but we had no people to populate it with.
My doc tried to talk me into doing another round of IFV and I was like, "No. I am not going through this again. I’m going to trust the universe. We're using the frozen ones. If I don't get pregnant, I'm buying a Harley."
If you know me at all, you will realize I don’t have a Harley. Or, the Yamaha Virago I had at the time I was going through all these treatments.
My twin daughters are now 21. They were once embryos frozen in a fertility clinic. Then they became fetuses. And then they became people.
Notice the order.
I clearly remember my doctor walking in after the implantation, saying, “Well, two of them look really good. Strong. The third is… eh.”
I can only assume that those two “good, strong” embryos are now my twin daughters.
About a year later, I got a call from the fertility clinic, asking what I wanted to do with the frozen embryos they still had.
They still had embryos? Who knew!
Turns out there were five frozen embryos. And I had to choose what to do with them.
My choices were:
Keep them frozen and pay the fertility clinic for storage
Donate them to an infertile couple
Give them to science
Authorize the clinic to destroy them
My rumination on these choices was:
I was already 40 years old and I was not going to have any more children, so I didn’t want to pay for them to be frozen for eternity (or until I stopped paying)
I don’t think I could have dealt with the knowledge that I might have biological children out there, who were full siblings to my daughters, who I didn’t know
I love science
Destroying them seemed pointless (see number three)
The problem was, in 2004, the Bush Administration had a rule in place that no federal funding could go to new lines of stem cell research.
This was a very weird compromise between the “right to life” folks who said experimenting on stem cells was murder and the science folks who pointed to all the life-saving potential treatments for people.
Not embryos. People.
Then-President George W. Bush, in announcing the decision, sounded a lot like the Alabama Supreme Court sounded this week when they announced that, in their opinion, frozen embryos are people.
This is what Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker said:
“Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
And this is what Bush said in 2001:
“My position on these issues is shaped by deeply held beliefs. I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our creator.”
And we’re surprised at Alabama’s decision?
Criminalizing Women (and Science)
The thing that I don’t understand about the Alabama decision is how it will work.
Joyce Vance quoted part of Parker’s decision (which I do not want to read). I want to highlight this particular sentence, because it is astonishing.
The Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court suggested that the fertility industry should adopt practices that will:
“…drastically reduce the chances of embryos being killed, whether in the creation process, the implantation process, the freezing process, or by willful killing when they become inconvenient.”
Let’s address this.
The Creation Process: I put out 24 eggs, but that only made 23 embryos. Would I or the fertility clinic be charged with murder, or at the very least negligent manslaughter, for that one egg-to-embryo failure?
The Implantation Process: Three embryos were implanted into my uterus the first time. None of them took. Did I murder them? More to the point, at least some of the embryos were deemed not viable, or at least less viable than the three that were implanted. I am guessing some of those turned out to be the frozen embryos I later learned were in storage. But some embryos didn’t make it. Was that murder?
The Freezing Process: I don’t know how embryos can be damaged in freezing, but the lawsuit that engendered this opinion was about the accidental unfreezing of frozen embryos. I can understand how that would be stressful for people who thought their future was banked. But is it murder? And will the person who made the mistake be charged?
Willful Killing: Oy. I’m about at the end of my rope here.
They’re embryos! NOT PEOPLE.
When my daughters were little I explained to them how babies were made by likening the process to pancakes. Now, stay with me here, because pancakes have three essential ingredients and embryos only have two. But I noted to them how the eggs and milk and flour were all separate things. Then they got combined together to make batter. The batter is the embryo. Then the batter would go on the griddle to cook. That griddle is the uterus. Then they would become full-fledged pancakes, that full-fledged people would eat.
Embryos are not people. And the Ten Commandments are not in our Constitution.
I’ve seen a lot of social media about child support and being able to use the child care tax credit when you’re pregnant, or even if you have frozen embryos.
I’m wondering who would pay to keep those embryos frozen, and how long they could be frozen without degrading.
I’m wondering if Christian Nationalists in the U.S. government will command that leftover embryos should be given to other couples, even if the PEOPLE whose sperm and eggs created the embryos are emotionally and ethically uncomfortable with that.
I’m wondering if people like my daughters will ever again exist in the U.S. Because surely fertility clinics will not take the risk of being charged with murder for doing basic science.
By the way, when the clinic informed me of my five extra embryos, I hung up the phone, looked up who was doing embryonic stem cell research, contacted a professor at a public university and asked if he wanted mine. He called me back within an hour, eager to take them. I did not ask how he would deal with Bush’s “deeply held beliefs” that would stifle his research. For all I know, he put them in a freezer till Obama rescinded the order.
And, for all I know, my daughters may be cured of a currently intractable disease because of the contributions of the embryos that were created (by people) in the process of their birth.
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See you on Sunday, at the usual time.