American Experience

IVF and Today's Stem Cell Debate

Robert George: In vitro fertilization is a way of creating a new human being, in the embryonic stage, in a petri dish, outside of a human body. Embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of the embryo in order to obtain stem cells, which might then be used for scientific purposes…

...We have an industry that has created perhaps as many as 400,000 excess embryos, human beings in the embryonic stage of development, who are now in a kind of never-never-land, a kind of limbo, frozen in cryopreservation units…

...We don’t know whether they will, in the end, as their proponents are suggesting, have therapeutic value, but they’re probably useful in basic science, and some people would find that sufficient to support even embryo destruction, to obtain stem cells for research. But there are plenty of people who favor in vitro fertilization and plenty of people who have themselves undergone in vitro treatment, who are opposed to the destruction of embryos, who are very concerned that the embryos who are created be allowed to continue their natural development. And of course there are some people who are opposed to in vitro fertilization, but who think that once in vitro fertilization takes place, and embryos are created, and some of those embryos are excess embryos that probably won’t be implanted and so will have very little in the way of a life prospect (they’ll be frozen away, for example), some people who oppose IVF nevertheless say, well, we should use those embryos, even if it means destroying them, in order to obtain their stem cells. I myself don’t take that view.

Arthur Caplan: If you look today at current debates about stem cell technology, as Yogi Berra once said, “It’s deja vu all over again.” All the debates are the same. I see a complete cycling of worries about the moral status of embryos, the safety of the procedure in terms of making cells by stem cell engineering that are not abnormal, that wouldn’t, if put in your body, kill you or run amok. There’s a lot of concern about the unnaturalness of stem cell engineering. There’s a fair amount of concern, if you will, that stem cell technology is just not a nice thing to do, that it’s yucky to do it — even if it does cure people. So many of the issues that came up around in vitro fertilization have reverberations and echoes into debates about things like stem cell research.

I think bioethics, even the early bioethics, did identify all the right questions to ask about test tube baby technologies. The politicians didn’t have the willpower to bring those issues into the policy arena, or to bring them up for public discussion. So part of the reason we’re still having fights, even today, about reproductive technologies or about stem cell research technologies, is that two decades ago politicians basically said, “Yeah, I know there are issues, but I don’t want anything to do with them.” So we are living, if you will, with the legacy of political cowardice, not so much ethical blindness…

...We’ve got 400,000 embryos and growing every day, in this country, that we don’t know what to do with, because we’ve never answered the question: Who’s got custody? Who can control them? Who determines their fate? So that’s an obvious place to regulate…

...What they did, both at the state legislatures and the federal legislature, was say, “Okay. Abortion is going to cost me votes. Whatever I do, it’s going to get people mad at me. This technology is all about embryos. Embryos get me in the middle of the abortion debate. I’m not talking about that. Goodbye. I don’t want to legislate, regulate, or have anything to say here.” So the legacy of that avoidance is that we never had a kind of sustained public debate about any of those questions, and we, in a sense, stumble toward answers but we never resolve them.