Family seeks wrongful death lawsuit after loss of frozen embryos

Apr 5, 2018 by

from SPUC:

The case raises ethical questions around IVF 

A couple whose frozen embryos were destroyed in a storage tank malfunction could seek action for wrongful death – if a judge rules that an embryo is considered a life.

This is just one of the dozens of lawsuits facing The University Hospitals Fertility Clinic in Cleveland, after the failure in early March of a cryopreservation tank containing approximately 4,000 eggs and embryos belonging to at least 950 families.

The accidental destruction of these very young human beings is raising a host of ethical and legal questions, and highlighting some of the inherent problems of IVF.

Is an embryo a person?

In Cleveland, clinic patients Wendy and Rick Penniman’s attorney is “asking the court to declare that an embryo is a person and that life begins at conception”, allowing the couple to bring a wrongful death lawsuit. However, the Roe v Wade decision, which legalised abortion, holds that a foetus, let alone an embryo, is not a person.

Antonia Tully, Director of Campaigns for SPUC said: “Of course we hope that the judge in this case does recognise the humanity of the embryos. But at the same time we must be clear that manufacturing human beings to order, outside the womb by IVF is inherently wrong. We must also remember that many other tiny embryonic humans will have been discarded at the time that these embryos were selected for freezing.”

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