Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

134 JOHN BERKMAN
the claim here involves the assumption that cryopreserving the
embryo is permanent or alternatively leads to experimentation
by a researcher, that is clearly not necessarily the case. If there
is something inherently wrong with cryopreservation of an
embryo, it cannot be because it is always permanent.
Furthermore, if, for example, the couple had a kind of moral
conversion right after they had created ten embryos through IVF
and wanted to do the best thing in that situation, what should
they do? The thing that would be most respectful of those
nascent lives would be to implant two or three, and freeze the
rest with the plan of gestating the rest in small groups as well. 35
Alternatively, one can imagine a scenario of a woman simultaneously
diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy and with a form of
cancer requiring radiation. She might seek to preserve the life of
her embryo by having it removed from the fallopian tube and
cryopreserved, with the hope that following the radiation treatment
she would be able to have the embryo reimplanted in her
uterus and gestate it to term. While a variety of circumstances
only be temporary, the embryo will be implanted later, and that there is no
intention of allowing the embryo to be experimented on. This uncited appeal
to DV I, 5 only makes sense if one understands that by “spares” DV I, 5 is
referring to those embryos which are definitely not destined for future
implantation (as argued in section one of this paper). Thus DV’s objection
to cryopreservation in DV I, 6 reads as follows: “The freezing of embryos,
even when carried out in order to preserve the life of an embryo - cryopreservation
- constitutes an offence against the respect due to human beings
by exposing them to grave risks of death or harm to their physical integrity
and depriving them, at least temporarily, of maternal shelter and gestation,
thus placing them in a situation in which further offences and manipulation
are possible.”
35 For a similar kind of argument, see Watt (1999), p. 352. “I can even
imagine cases in which it might be morally obligatory [to adopt particular
frozen embryos], because one was morally responsible for the embryo’s (sic)
being conceived. The woman who commissions the production of embryos
from her husband’s sperm and another woman’s ova bears considerable
responsibility for the fate of any embryos left on ice. If the ovum donor is
unwilling or unable to gestate, a woman who regrets the commission might
rightly consider she herself has a duty to gestate, in groups of two or three,
all remaining frozen embryos.”