April 23, 2007VOL. 45, NO. 8Oakland, CA

Embryo adoption leads to ethics discussion

Erin Smith, 2, who was conceived in a petri dish through in vitro fertilization and adopted as an embryo, is seen with her adoptive parents, Dawn and Tim Smith, outside Holy Cross Church in Dover, Del., in early March. CNS PHOTO/DON BLAKE/THE DIALOG

By Gary Morton
Catholic News Service

DOVER, Del. (CNS) -- Tim and Dawn Smith adopted a leftover frozen embryo in January 2004 and gave birth nine months later to their adopted daughter, Erin.
At the time they had no idea it would lead them to a public battle in coming years with legislators and lobbyists seeking to let such embryos be destroyed for embryonic stem-cell research.

The fate of such frozen embryos no longer wanted by their genetic parents is at the heart of a debate in the Delaware Legislature.

On March 29 the Senate voted 13-7 to adopt the Delaware Regenerative Medicine Act, which would sanction human embryonic stem-cell research in Delaware, allowing researchers to destroy the embryos to harvest their stem cells. The bill was awaiting action in the House.

The Smiths, who met in college and married in 1991, wanted three or four children, but in 1997 they learned that they were infertile.

One day as Dawn Smith was looking through a phone book listing of fertility clinics, she noticed one that offered embryo adoptions. After considering traditional adoption alternatives, the couple decided to try the embryo adoption.

“I really wanted to experience pregnancy,” she said. “It is kind of neat to be both Erin’s birth mother and adoptive mother.”

While Erin was born in October 2004, she was conceived in vitro about eight years earlier. Her embryo lay frozen for about seven years before the Smiths volunteered to adopt her and have her implanted in Dawn Smith’s womb.

Last year when the state Legislature was debating a bill similar to the one currently under consideration, Tim Smith listened to part of the debate and was rankled to hear one proponent of the bill refer to the “excess” embryos in fertility clinics as “medical waste.”

“I didn’t like him calling them that,” Smith said in an interview with The Dialog, Wilmington diocesan newspaper.

He and his wife had learned about the bill from reading a Web log, or blog, on the Internet about A Rose and a Prayer, a group formed to fight embryonic stem-cell research.

“We sent an e-mail to Ellen Barrosse (cited in the blog as an organizer of A Rose and a Prayer) saying we had a vested interest,” Tim Smith said. “We said, here’s our story, if it can be of use somehow.”

The contact led to radio advertisements last year and again this year in which he talks about his blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter as “a typical 2-year-old” and objects to language used by some backers of the embryo research bill.

“Some would call Erin medical waste,” he says in the ad. “I call her my daughter.”

“If Delaware’s Legislature passes Senate Bill 5,” he says, “embryos like Erin could be killed and used for medical experiments.”

Tim Smith grew up in an evangelical family. Dawn Smith was baptized Catholic but left the church while in high school and joined her husband’s faith when they married. Their faith journey led through the Presbyterian Church to Catholicism, and last year Tim was received into the church and Dawn made a profession of faith. They are members of Holy Cross Parish in Dover.

They said the Catholic Church has deepened their pro-life commitment.

“We certainly had a strong pro-life position and believed those little embryos are human -- and medically speaking they are,” Tim Smith said. “But it’s been profound to realize the Church’s position on the sanctity of life.”

The Smiths, who want to have another child from an adopted embryo, are aware of different views within the Church on embryo adoption. Tim Smith said they prayed for guidance on the moral implications.

“It would seem, in the absence of (any) clear teaching about it, that we should err
on the side of giving them (frozen embryos) a chance,” he said.

Last year ethicists argued both sides of the issue at a meeting in Dallas attended by many bishops from the Americas. A new book from the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, “Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage and the Right to Life,” explores the ethical issues.

Catholic teaching clearly rejects in vitro fertilization, saying conception should only take place in the context of the conjugal act. But once the embryo from in vitro fertilization already exists, new questions arise that are not clearly resolved by Church teaching.

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a staff ethicist at the bioethics center, said pregnancy “must be the fruit of husband and wife.” Since embryo adoption involves implanting a woman with the fruit of another couple, “my own opinion is that it is not moral to do this,” he told The Dialog.

But he added that in the absence of authoritative teaching Catholics who study the issue prayerfully and reach a different conclusion may act in good faith.

Peter J. Cataldo, a center consultant, told The Dialog that he supports embryo adoption in certain circumstances. “Even though the Church teaches that in vitro fertilization is morally unacceptable, the child who is engendered is fully human and possesses full human dignity, which must be respected,” he said.

“The frozen embryo is indeed a human embryo with human rights, the most basic of which is the right to life,” he added.

He said if an infertile couple is considering adopting an embryo, “the primary reason should be to save the life of a child.”

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