#embryo adoption

[turtletotem]

People at work and church keep telling me Baby Turtle has my eyes, which is hilarious to me because she absolutely does not, on account of not sharing any of my DNA. But her eyes are gorgeous so I will totally take the compliment.

[kalcium-yippee]

Just wanna say rip to the embryos who were in utero w me. Yall were the first real ones. Never saw my hungry ass coming😋🙏

[spiritualdirections]

More on embryo adoption

In a previous post, I nibbled around the edges of the question of embryo adoption, pointing out that the Church does not permit it in practice right now, but it has not closed down debate over it. I used this debate to show a difference between the New Natural Law movement, Catholic intellectuals who are enthusiastically in favor of embryo adoption, and the traditional natural lawyers (e.g., the Holy See) who think it is a bad idea practically and a mortal sin to boot. This is not the first time advocates for the New Natural Law theory has concluded that what traditionally is a sin, even a mortal sin, is not a sin at all--other examples include the use of sex toys and masturbation within marriage, and calling a man a woman.

The substantive question of embryo adoption is surprisingly complicated. There is the central question of whether it is morally neutral under ideal conditions, and the much more practical question of whether it is moral under current and near-future conditions. For example, an embryo that’s frozen can survive for a decade or longer before dying a natural death, while in thawing the embryo and attempting to impregnate an adoptive mother there’s currently a significant chance that the embryo (the vulnerable child) will die as a direct result. One could imagine a situation where the science makes this process perfectly safe, therefore removing this objection to embryo adoption; but it’s unlikely that the science could move forward without a lot of trial and error, which would kill a lot of vulnerable children in the process. 

So practically, for now, even the New Natural Lawyers ought to have objections to embryo adoption as possible under existing technology--and that’s independently of the horrifying prospect of companies sorting through the embryos to figure out the best ones to advertise to prospective adoptive parents (”Her mother is a knockout...and a genius!” “Worried about birth defects? We have a full line of genetically perfect embryos...”). But what about the idea of embryo adoption? The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seems to say that it is intrinsically immoral, while John Finnis, Robert George, Chris Tollefsen, and others insist that it’s our best way forward.

The big difference between traditional natural law and the new version is whether our bodies matter for the analysis of moral acts--the new version says not really, it’s all about our intention or motive; the traditional version says that since God created our bodies a certain way, a moral act works with the way God created our bodies while it would be immoral to work against the way God created our bodies. An example of this traditional reasoning can be found in this helpful paper by Charles Robertson, “A Thomistic Analysis of Embryo Adoption.” Here’s the beginning of the meat of the argument:

“First in the order of intention, but last in execution, then, is that the adoptive parents raise the embryo as their child. On the hypothesis of this end, a certain order of means becomes necessary: first, the mother must give birth to the child; second, the woman must become pregnant; third, the means to pregnancy is the transfer of the existing embryo into the woman‘s uterus. The first action, then, in the order of execution will be the woman‘s allowing a technician to act upon her body in virtue of its potential to carry a child. This potential exists in her because her physical constitution is such that certain of her bodily organs are ordered to the procreation of offspring. These bodily organs are the vehicle of her generative power. The generative power has as its subject the whole body-soul composite and as such is dependent for its operation on the existence and proper functioning of certain bodily organs, namely, the organs of the reproductive system (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (ST), I, q. 77, a. 5).  This single power, which exists in all living things, is the ontological basis of the organs of the reproductive system‘s activities, and has as its formal object the continued existence of the species (ST  I, q. 78, a. 2...). Since the uterus is an organ of the reproductive system, to direct this organ to its proper activity (gestation of a conceptus) is to introduce an order into it that is either in accordance with the teleological order of the generative faculty or not. The uterus exists for the sake of the generative faculty's proper activity, hence to intend to use the uterus entails a use of the generative faculty itself. The intentional order of the action is accomplished by the use the adoptive mother makes of her generative faculty, first, by allowing a technician to introduce the embryo into her womb, then by gestating the child for nine months and finally by giving birth. Consequently, the intention to give birth to a child, whether that child is one‘s own or not, always entails the choice to make use of the generative faculty.18  Hence the moral goodness or malice of embryo transfer will be determined by the order of reason governing the proper use of the generative faculty.”

fn18. Contrasted with traditional legal adoption, then, there is a very clear difference: in traditional adoption, the intention to raise a child as one‘s own does not entail the choice to use the generative faculty whereas embryo adoption necessarily entails that choice.” 

Anyway, you can start to see why this argument is not just complicated in the number of factors to be involved, but also complicated (or at least, technical) in its core argument. It’s not the sort of thing one can answer casually. Even our analogies are difficult--is a frozen embryo more like a child in an orphanage (the above analysis explains the difference), or more like a patient in a coma who will likely die if taken off life-support? The second analogy (though very imperfect) helps us understand the perspective that the embryo’s state is sad but ultimately just another death, the fate of all human persons in this fallen world, and not the worst thing.

A different question, though, is whether the embryos can be baptized.

[queerlybelovedones]

Anxiety riddled pregnancy

Here I am, 14 weeks (and 2 days) pregnant and anxiety has only let up a little bit. Still no symptoms, still at same weight, still wearing same clothes (some even a little loose), and still not even a hint of a bump. Seriously, even while laying in bed and pushing in, can barely feel the hard bump. If it weren’t for the Doppler finding a heartbeat consistently I would be losing my mind.

My cousin who is pregnant with her first, only 10 days ahead of me, is in maternity pants with strangers asking how far along she is. She’s got all the symptoms, she thinks she’s even started feeling flutters (16 weeks!) and yet here I am paranoid baby has stopped growing. Next appt is April 10th but no ultrasound booked. Maybe I can convince her to send me for one 🤔

To distract myself, I have been cruising the embryo donation pages. We were on a bunch of recipient lists but with 26 frozen embryos we will likely have many to donate. I love reading the posts and hoping we get to help many people have kids. I’m trying to think of what we would want in recipients and when we would make that decision. I’d love to start now since there’s a couple that I love. But definitely want to make sure we get our healthy child(ren) before giving any away.

[prolifeproliberty]

This is absolutely terrible. What enrages me most is that donating the embryos so they would have a chance at life was considered "not an option" because the "emotional toll" was too high. Excuse me? The emotional toll of your children having a chance to grow up and be loved and cared for was higher than that of killing them and turning them into jewelry?

[catholiccom-blog]

Is It OK to Adopt an Embryo?

Full Question

        What is Church teaching on embryo adoption?        

Answer

The closest the Church has come to addressing this specific issue was in the document Dignitas Personae:

It has also been proposed, solely in order to allow human beings to be born who are otherwise condemned to destruction, that there could be a form of “prenatal adoption.” This proposal, praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life, presents however various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above (19).

However, the USCCB did not see this as a definitive decision:

Proposals for “adoption” of abandoned or unwanted frozen embryos are also found to pose problems, because the Church opposes use of the gametes or bodies of others who are outside the marital covenant for reproduction. [Dignitas Personae] raises cautions or problems about these new issues but does not formally make a definitive judgment against them.

Theologian Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk notes in his article What Should We Do With Frozen Embryos:

There is ongoing debate among reputable Catholic theologians about this matter, and technically it remains an open question. A recent Vatican document called Dignitas Personae expressed serious moral reservations about the approach, without, however, explicitly condemning it as immoral.

For both sides of the debate, I recommend: Dignitas Personae and the Question of "Embryo Adoption" A Debate on Dignitas Personae

[queerlybelovedones]

30+ lbs down

Wife is still doing keto and I’m still doing low carb. My uterus is actually behaving and obeying the birth control 😂 which hopefully means I won’t have a period for our trip to Europe in September! Yay infertility benefits!

My anxiety has been super high lately after sending all the forms to the embryo donor. So many worries and questions.

What if it’s wasting our time and money? What if they change their mind? What if the problem is implantation too? What if we waste all 4 embryos? What if we could just use my eggs? What if losing the weight hasn’t helped my hormones enough? What if it has? Should we try once more with my eggs? Would they use a different protocol? What about the anonymous donor they used? What if we regret not trying again? What if we regret spending the money to try again and wasting it?

Help? Thoughts? Suggestions?

[queerlybelovedones]

It’s really happening

We have the forms from CNY for the direct embryo adoption. They’re willing to accept the embryos in the donors name but we have a bunch to do.

Get donors FDA testing, get sperm donors testing, embryology report, thaw protocol, coordinate physically moving them, and make up a contract. Not to mention notarize all that.

All for 4 embryos.

Now I’m starting to panic and second guess all this.

There’s no guarantee they’d work. The sperm donor is anonymous (which is something we never thought we’d do). But they’d have the contact with the donor family and a full sibling.

I think I had a part of my mind thinking that if I went keto and we did a cycle at CNY then it would magically work. We would have chosen the sperm donor. I would’ve worked so hard to make it work. My wife would’ve been involved. I dunno. I had written the idea off in my head but CNY thought they could do it differently and the keto has really changed my body.

If we don’t use all 4 embryos, the donor requests they be destroyed instead of finding another recipient. I don’t want to back out now. But I worry I might regret not trying one more cycle. But we don’t want a lot of kids. But we don’t want to destroy any embryos.

But.

Fuck.

Help?!?!?!