Michael Ennis
Culture of Strife
Both stem cell research and embryo adoption destroy the building blocks of life. So why do many religious conservatives criticize one and champion the other?
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The late pope’s catchphrase first appeared in our political arena when George W. Bush started talking about the culture of life in his 2000 campaign. Not only has our born-again Methodist president popularized the pithy pontifical slogan, but he also precisely echoes the language and theology of “The Gospel of Life” while continuing to disagree with the Vatican on capital punishment, preemptive war, and, as it turns out, IVF, for which the president has taken pains to reiterate his support.
As the culture of life bounced along unpredictably from the mind of the future pope to the pen of the late pope to the mouth of our president, the freezers were filling with frozen embryos. An oft-cited RAND Corporation study from 2002 identified almost 400,000 “frosties,” as they’re known in the trade, of which almost 90 percent were being kept in cold storage for future implantations by their biological parents. Of the rest, about 11,000 had been donated for biomedical research, which could yield an estimated 275 new “lines” for embryonic stem cell research (the Bush administration currently approves 22 preexisting lines for federally funded research). About 9,000 embryos have been designated as available for “donation” (the term the fertility industry prefers) to other couples, with an equal number expected to be discarded.
The concept of adopting some of these frozen embryos originated with California-based Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which started its Snowflakes program in 1997. (Frosties were dubbed “snowflakes” to emphasize that each embryo is a genetically unique human.) Even before President Bush made his 2001 decision allowing research only on embryonic stem cell lines that had already been extracted from discarded embryos—thus avoiding the “further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life”—some of Snowflakes’ clients had trundled their babies to congressional offices and lobbied against embryonic stem cell research. Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has distributed millions of dollars in federal grants to promote “public awareness” of the adoption option, with most of the money going to Snowflakes and another Christian-affiliated program.
That awareness was greatly increased when 21 Snowflakes families, both adopters and donors, met the president at the May photo op. According to Snowflakes’ own figures, at about that time 120 client families had thawed 985 contractually adopted embryos, of which a bit more than half weren’t viable after being defrosted—the average rate of attrition for the IVF industry. About half of the client families eventually ended up with a total of 81 children (twins and triplets, the result of those multiple implantations, are common in IVF), again an average success rate. But that’s roughly a ten-to-one ratio of dead embryos to living children, a rather costly “rescue,” to use a term ubiquitous in adoption circles, of embryos that weren’t in any imminent danger in the deep freeze; their donors, who must give consent to any transfer of their embryos, could instead have opted to keep them frozen. (A California baby was recently born after thirteen years at minus 319 degrees.)
Shortly before meeting with the lucky snowflakes who survived their rescues, the president told reporters he would exercise the first veto of his tenure if Congress passed a bill to lift restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. He rejected using “taxpayers’ money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life,” but just three days later, the president was lauding a program that uses taxpayers’ money to promote the destruction of a lot of embryos in order to save a few. And it would be mass destruction if somehow all the 29,000 embryos destined for research, donation, or discarding were put up for adoption (in practice the vast majority of couples don’t like the idea of someone else raising their genetic offspring). Currently, the cost of rescuing perhaps 3,000 snowflakes would be more than 25,000 “innocent human lives.”
But the White House is hardly alone in advancing the fuzzy ethical concept that an embryo is absolutely, positively an inviolable human life—except when it needs to be sacrificed to make the point that it is absolutely, positively an inviolable human life. Powerful conservative Christian organizations such as the Family Research Council, which had pilloried the president for his indifference to human life after his 2001 decision, have leaped to embrace embryo adoption. Remarkably, even the Catholic Church waffles on this one; almost two decades after ruling that IVF performed with donor embryos (the essential procedure in embryo adoption) is even more illicit than using your own, the Vatican continues to insist that it needs more “scientific and statistical data” before making a ruling on embryo adoption. Little wonder that some skeptics believe that embryo adoption is a back door to criminalizing abortion: If a day-old embryo could be legally adopted as a living person under the law—currently only property law applies—then every fetus would acquire the legal status of a person.
However, for the culture of life to be absolutely, positively consistent on the inviolability of the embryo, religious conservatives across the board would have to suck it up and attack IVF as aggressively as they have abortion rights. That would result in the spectacle of embryo rights protesters descending on Washington, waving blurry gray microscope photos of amorphous eight-cell clusters, while thousands of adorable kids and accomplished young adults counterprotest in T-shirts reading “Former Test-Tube Baby.” Given IVF’s already overwhelming public support, who do you think is going to win that confrontation—and why are we not likely to see it?
So our frozen embryos remain in liquid nitrogen limbo, their status morally ambiguous even to religious conservatives who so starkly contrast their culture of life with the confused moral “relativism” of a secular culture of death. Of course, the object of embryo adoption is humane and high-minded, but it is no more or less so—and no more or less deadly to embryos—than the compassionate goals of embryonic stem cell research; it’s the hypocrisy with which the distinction has been made that should raise more than a minor alarm. At a time when we are increasingly outsourcing our public and private morality to a consortium of powerful institutions—the megachurches, televangelical ministries, advocacy groups like Focus on the Family, and the White House—we are in danger of building a culture of life crafted, at best, with careless naivete and, at worst, with glib political slogans and cynical duplicity.
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