Stances on embryos stir up serious debate

WASHINGTON -- On the day last week that the House voted by a 44-person margin to fund new lines of stem cells made from frozen embryos left over from fertility procedures, President Bush cuddled babies and rubbed the heads of toddlers at a White House reception.

Bush's hugging carried a political message intended to justify his decision to use his first-ever veto to block the stem cell bill. The kids at this White House reception were ''snowflake children," born of frozen embryos left over from fertility procedures that were then adopted by other couples and implanted in the womb of the new mother. The adoption of the embryos was arranged through a Christian group promoted by James Dobson's religious political group, Focus on Family.

No one could question the joy of the White House scene, but people might wonder about the intended message of Bush's event. Obviously, the president meant to underscore his view that leftover embryos are living things, children waiting to be born. But it wasn't clear whether Bush meant to underscore all the implications of viewing frozen embryos as children for the purposes of future right-to-life battles.

Extra embryos are often created in the course of in vitro fertilization procedures, as doctors strive to implant the optimum number of embryos to create a pregnancy. About 400,000 such embryos are currently frozen, most of them the property of couples who underwent fertility procedures and may choose to use them in the future. About 2 percent of the embryos are slated to be discarded, and scientists are eager to use them for stem cell research into cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other illnesses.

But the fate of all the frozen embryos must be considered. In many cases, the couples who created them are aging and uninterested in having more children. In other cases, couples have died or separated or a prospective mother was found to be medically unable to withstand the procedure.

Couples in those situations may choose to offer the embryos for adoption by people such as those in the Snowflake Embryo Adoption Program -- but the implications of such a decision can be serious. Some couples do not want to see their biological offspring brought into the world by others, or they fear the legal or financial responsibilities if their frozen embryos become children. At the same time, it's highly unlikely that enough willing women exist to adopt all the leftover embryos, so large numbers would remain in any case.

In vitro fertilization -- the procedure in which eggs and sperm are combined to create embryos outside the body, and then implanted in the uterus -- has long provoked discomfort among right-to-life groups. Some, such as Dobson's organization, have drawn attention to various aspects of such procedures, but most right-to-lifers have been reluctant to take issue with fertility medicine.

For one thing, enabling otherwise infertile couples to have children can be seen as an enhancement of the right to life. And frozen embryos have a vastly different status from actual fetuses: They aren't implanted in wombs and aren't growing. Left alone, they could remain frozen at microscopic size for all time.

Moreover, such embryos often do not survive beyond conception in nature, either. Large numbers of fertilized eggs fail to implant themselves in the wall of the uterus at all, or later are lost through miscarriage. Many women opt for in vitro procedures to escape just such a march of futility.

For all these reasons, antiabortion groups have stepped gingerly across the fertility landscape -- until the stem cell issue brought them out in force. But the actions of these antiabortion activists, Bush among them, only serve to put a spotlight on the status of frozen embryos, raising the thorny issue of whether they should be considered human life.

Bush has said he is inclined to resolve all disputes in favor of the ''culture of life," and preventing stem-cell researchers from using leftover embryos is consistent with that position. But so, too, are many other steps, such as banning the creation of such embryos or refusing to allow them to be discarded under any circumstances.

With an antiabortion president whose reelection was due in part to a high turnout of religious conservatives, the United States is confronting a new frontier of antiabortion issues that had been avoided in the past. The extraordinary government intervention in the Terri Schiavo case brought new intensity to the right-to-die debate. The question of what to do with frozen embryos may yet create a new movement around the right to be born.

Peter S. Canellos is the chief of the Globe's Washington bureau. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capitol and beyond.