My Answers

Because I pride myself on forthrightness, I'll go ahead and tell y'all how I answer the difficult moral questions posed below.  I've thought about this issue quite a bit more than most people have, but not because I'm a scientist.  Rather, I've thought about these issues principally in my capacity as an IVF patient. Before we began IVF treatment, our doctors asked us a lot of very difficult questions about the final disposition of the embryos we were asking them to create.  If there are extra embryos, would we like them frozen, destroyed, donated to science, or donated to another couple? What happens to our embryos if we get divorced? If we both die while we have embryos in storage, what should be done with them?

Now, I like to think of myself as a morally serious person, and so Sarah and I gave some serious thought to most of these very heavy questions.  (An exception was the "what happens in the event of divorce" question, which I glossed over on the grounds that I'm more likely to be eaten by winged pigs from the Crab Nebula than to get divorced.)  Our answers, in the end, all reflected our ultimate conviction that we were asking the doctors to create tiny little people who were deserving of the best shot at life we could give them.  We resolved that we would not undergo "selective reduction" of excess embryos.  We decided that we would freeze any extra embryos, and that we would ultimately have each and every viable embryo transferred to Sarah.  If we died with embryos in storage, we decided that they'd be donated to other couples.  Under no circumstances did we want our embryonic offspring willfully destroyed for any reason.

Of course, there are limits to what can be done.  You have to take the doctors' expert advice on which embryos can be saved and which cannot; the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of zygotes are going to die no matter what you do. (For those of you who object to all IVF treatment on account of this fact, you should know that the overwhelming majority of naturally conceived zygotes are going to die no matter what you do, too.)  You've also got to balance their rights against each other.  At Day 3, we were told that something like eight embryos were still viable; by Day 5 only two were considered transferrable and the rest were allowed to die.  In effect, we had lessened the probability of survival for six embryos in order to greatly increase the survivability of the remaining two.  That said, at no point did anyone willfully kill any of our embryos; at all points we (acting through the staff of the clinic) did the best we could to keep them alive.  That we could do no more was a technical, and not a moral, failing.

That said, you'd be surprised at how attached one can get to one's offspring even at the zygote stage.  You'd be even more surprised at the severity of the emotional blow every time you're told that one or more of the embryos have died (or are unavoidably headed that way.)  We made our decisions about the fates of our embryos rationally, before they ever existed.  The emotional experience of IVF treatment (and subsequently pregnancy) has only increased our conviction that we made the right decisions.