Letting go of the embryo

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about people’s relationship to their frozen embryos. Because IVF treatment is so expensive and success is so hit-or-miss, couples generally create more embryos than they need. Those remaining after conception are stored in deep freezes. But couples become attached to those embryos — blastocysts, really — and can have trouble letting go of them.

The article gives an overview of different relationships with these embryos. Some people are willing to let them be used for research. Some are willing to donate them to other couples. But others are unwilling to have them donated, even though it would help another family get through the painful situation they themselves have experienced, because they regard these as “their” embryos and are unsure of what kind of life they wold have with a new family.

Some people are simply so conflicted that they are unable to decide what to do. Some simply walk away, leaving the clinics to make a decision. It of course costs money to keep these embryos alive, and from what the article says they don’t survive in a frozen state indefinitely. It sounded as if after 10 years they start to deteriorate.

There are interesting points that arise about attachment and about anthropomorphizing. The attachment comes in of course because people think of these embryos as “theirs” and are unwilling to let go of them. They’ll die if they’re not implanted, and yet for them to be implanted they’d have to be donated to another family. To donate means to allow your embryos to live and also (as I noted) helps another family. People are so attached to their embryos that, in effect, they would rather they die than be given life with other parents. I’ve no doubt that very few couples would make the decision to allow real children to die rather than be adopted, so the embryos have an odd status — not quite real (you can allow them to die), but real enough that you regard them as your own children.

Calling the other issue “anthopomorphization” may be provocative, but I don’t mean it to be. Anthropomorphizing is where we attribute human qualities to something that is not human (e.g. “I’m sure my poodle understands every word I say”). Embryos are certainly genetically human and many people regard them as people. The abortion debate is not one I want to get into. What I’m specifically talking about is the tendency to see an embryo not just as it is, but to project it into the future, imagining it as having a future life. One woman described a freezer full of embryos as being “like an orphanage.” Another woman couldn’t donate her embryos because she would worry too much about “what kind of parents they were with, what kind of life they had.”

At one time a girlfriend of mine got pregnant and we started planning to bring up a child. But then she had a miscarriage, and an interesting thing happened: we felt a sense of bereavement. We’d been imagining the child we would have in the future, and with the death of the embryo we lot this potential child. Even though the child never existed we felt its loss. Such is attachment. A similar thing happened when we switched from adopting from China to adopting from Ethiopia. I’d imagined the Chinese daughter we would have, and then once we switched I felt like I’d lost her, even though at the time we switched “she” would certainly not have even been conceived.

Being attached to an embryo is not being attached to a bundle of cells, but being attached to our imagining of a future human being. That being exists in the imagination, and we feel an emotional relationship to it.

This is similar to that way in which we find it hard to imagine that we will cease to exist. For example in a Scientific American article Jesse Bering reported on how we have no way of knowing what it would be like not to exist:

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective.

Similarly, we have problems conceiving of our not having existed. Consider, for example, that there were as many sperm competing to make “you” as there are stars in the universe. Imagine that another sperm had got to the egg first. “You” would not exist. And yet that’s hard to conceive of.

I think that similarly we find it difficult to imagine other people not existing, and so when we create an embryo we have a natural tendency to imagine the person it will become.

I don’t blame any parents who cling to their embryos, but I think it would be good if they reflected more on the tendency to invent a fictitious personhood for those embryos, especially when this leads to decisions that are unhelpful.

2 Responses to “Letting go of the embryo”

1. Rob R says:

   December 11, 2008 at 9:28 pm

   I’ve had two thoughts on account of this on both sides of the issue.

   For the issue of human life at conception, for many people, it is enough to establish that humanity, or a life deserving entity begins at conception because the fertilized egg has human DNA and it is alive. But of course if it is frozen, it is not alive in a biological sense.

   On the other hand, there is something to be said against this notion that the future potential is not enough to establish the sacredness and worthyness of the frozen embryos. When someone is murdered, the grave tragedy of her death for the grieving is the loss of the future that we imagine that she would have had if not murdered. Whether someone is guilty of that murder is decided precisely on whether they have taken away a future of life. If you were shot and in critical condition, the deciding factor of whether the person who shot you would be guilty of murder or not is dependent upon whether you future will soon end or not.
2. Rob R says:

   December 11, 2008 at 9:44 pm

   As for the quote, though I may not be speaking to the point that the author attempts to establish (and this is somewhat of a tangent, because I’m not speaking of abortion and when life begins either) I just thought I would note that science has not yet reduced our subjective experience to the physical and chemical mechanisms of the brain. Although we may be able to watch some physiological processes happen in the brain when one experiences the color blue, it still does not explain what that subjective experience is in and of itself and it’s absolutely short sited to identify that experience with just a net of firing neurons.

   Again, this is a tangent and I don’t mean to detract from a decent point allowing one’s embryo’s to be used (abeit, I’m not confident in the ethics of using it for research, but I do agree that they should be encouraged to allow others to try for children.