The Strange Legalities Of Not Quite Persons

The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves, and to my mind one of the worst in current circulation is the designation "potential person" used to justify treating unborn children as having only as much value as their parents want to endow them with. The legalities resulting from this cultural self deception can be truly strange.

There's an article making the rounds about a NASA scientist who adopted and gave birth to an embryo which had been frozen for 18 years. The utterly surreal thing that struck me out of the article, however, was this description of the legal process:

Because embryos cannot be sold (although the ethics of that were recently challenged in the New England Journal of Medicine), those that are donated must be “adopted,” with the receivers going through the same adoption procedure they would face if adopting a baby. So Burke quickly put together her adoption portfolio for the Oregon couple, and then endured a five-month wait as they pondered who to ultimately get the embryos.

“A lot of people wanted those embryos, so they had a pretty arduous process to go through,” Burke said, although she admitted the wait, plus endless rounds of personal questions, became frustrating. “I wanted to know what was going to happen, so that if they didn’t pick me I could move on.”

So apparently our laws are such that adopting an embryo requires the same paperwork as adopting any other child -- yet at the same time it is perfectly legal for a couple which has created a number of embryos during an IVF procedure to have the "left over" embryos destroyed at any time and for any reason. They're treated as persons or as waste depending on the wishes of their biological parents.