Snowflake Babies

Why Parents Should Be Able To Adopt The 700,000 Frozen Embryos IVF Has Left Behind.

The Federalist: University of Utah bioethicist Maureen Condic was recently appointed to the National Science Board. Appointments are made based on leadership in research, education, and distinguished service. She is the first board member from the University of Utah in 50 years and only the second ever.

“Being appointed to the National Science Board is a tremendous honor for me and for the University of Utah,” Condic said in a November press release. “I am excited to be of service to our country and to the scientific community by bringing a focus on bioethics and biomedical research to this eminent body of scholars.”

By sheer coincidence, I was privileged to hear Condic speak just last week. She was in Casper, Wyoming to deliver two lectures on human embryology. In the first, she detailed the development of the human embryo for the first week of life. Over the course of this lecture, she explained why all the scientific literature on the subject has concluded that the life of a human being begins at the moment of egg-sperm fusion.

That’s not an exaggeration. Thousands of independent, peer-reviewed publications support this uncontested conclusion. Not a single published study concludes anything other than that human life begins the very second the sperm meets the egg.

Condic’s second presentation built on these basic facts of embryology to examine several of the cutting-edge embryo technologies of our day. She took her audience through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), “three-parent embryos,” CRISPR gene editing, and the like. Her aim was to distinguish between ethical experimentation for healing and repairing human pathologies and unethical experimentation involving injury to and the destruction of human beings.

Only days after her Casper lectures, a baby was brought home to southwest Wyoming who spotlighted the practical implications of what Condic said. Out of respect for her privacy, I will call her Mary.

Mary came into being in July 2014. Her biological parents donated sperm and eggs to an IVF clinic. These were brought together in a laboratory, where Mary was conceived, along with numerous congenital brothers and sisters. Sadly, more children were conceived than were transferred into the womb of a waiting mother. So Mary was frozen at -320 degrees Fahrenheit — along with about a dozen of her siblings.  MORE