Large numbers of embryos, in other words, die as collateral damage in any case, side effects of normal, natural attempts to get pregnant.
http://machineslikeus.com/articles/CollateralDamage1.ht
"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined," declared Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government professor, also a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/34948.html
Let us start with the free and completely unfettered liberty to establish a pregnancy by sexual reproduction without any "medical" assistance.
What are people and societies who accept this free and unfettered liberty committing themselves to? What has a God who has ordained natural procreation committed herself to?
We now know that for every successful pregnancy that results in a live birth many, perhaps as many as five early embryos will be lost or "miscarry" (although these are not perhaps "miscarriages" as the term is normally used, because this sort of very early embryo loss is almost always entirely unnoticed). Many of these embryos will be lost because of genetic abnormalities but some would have been viable. How are we to think of the decision to attempt to have a child in the light of these facts? One obvious and inescapable conclusion is that God and/or nature has ordained that "spare" embryos be produced for almost every pregnancy, and that most of these will have to die in order that a sibling embryo can come to birth. Thus the sacrifice of embryos seems to be an inescapable and inevitable part of the process of procreation.
http://newhumanist.org.uk/443
In vitro fertilization, IVF, is a wonderful technique whereby couples that cannot conceive normally are helped to achieve their dream. The woman is stimulated by hormone injections to super-ovulate. As many as a dozen eggs are harvested from her ovaries under general anaesthetic. An attempt is made to fertilize all these eggs with her husband’s sperm, in a dish. Of those that are fertilized, two, or occasionally three, are chosen for insertion into the uterus. The remainder are either flushed down the drain, or used for research, or frozen for future possible use. Of the two or three that are implanted, the expectation is that no more than one will survive. Sometimes twins are born and very occasionally triplets. But doctors do not implant three conceptuses in the hope of making triplets. Quite the contrary. In the unlikely event that all three implant successfully and develop, normal practice is to kill at least one of them. A surplus is provided in the hope that one will survive. IVF doctors, in other words, do what nature (or God if that is how your mind works) does anyway: they budget extra embryos which are destined to die as collateral damage in the course of bringing one of their siblings to term.
http://machineslikeus.com/articles/CollateralDamage1.html
Sexual Intercourse While Trying to Conceive Causes More Embryo Loss Than Abortion:
If you truly value each embryo as much as each born child, then you would have to be against anyone ever having another child, because more embryos die than are ever born, so the bottom line is, you kill more unborn children than ever get born, just in the process of trying to have a born child.
If your first reaction is that, well, that loss is really just part of nature, and so it's not that bad, then I ask you this:
If it is ok that up to 9 embryos die for every child born, would it be ok if some of your born children died while you were trying to conceive another?
OF COURSE NOT, RIGHT? But why? Their deaths would just be part of nature, exactly equivalent to the embryos that die so that one can be born, right?
The answer is, no one really values an embryo as much as they do a born child, no matter what they think.
"We now know that for every successful pregnancy which results in a live birth, many, perhaps as many as five, early embryos will be lost or 'miscarry' (although these are not perhaps miscarriages' as the term is normally used, because this sort of very early embryo loss is almost always entirely unnoticed).
How are we to think of the decision to have a child in the light of these facts? One obvious and inescapable conclusion is that God and/or nature has ordained that 'spare' embryos be produced for almost every pregnancy, and that most of these will have to die in order that a sibling embryo can come to birth. Thus the sacrifice of embryos seems to be an inescapable and inevitable part of the process of procreation. .**"
Large numbers of embryos, in other words, die as collateral damage in any case, side effects of normal, natural attempts to get pregnant. source
In fact, In Vitro Fertilization Kills Less Embryos Than Sexual Intercourse:
"[D]efenders of in vitro fertilization point out that embryo loss in assisted reproduction is less frequent than in natural pregnancy, in which more than half of all fertilized eggs either fail to implant or are otherwise lost. This fact highlights a further difficulty with the view that equates embryos and persons. If natural procreation entails the loss of some embryos for every successful birth, perhaps we should worry less about the loss of embryos that occurs in in vitro fertilization and stem-cell research. Those who view embryos as persons might reply that high infant mortality would not justify infanticide. But the way we respond to the natural loss of embryos suggests that we do not regard this event as the moral or religious equivalent of the death of infants. Even those religious traditions that are the most solicitous of nascent human life do not mandate the same burial rituals and mourning rites for the loss of an embryo as for the death of a child. Moreover, if the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions; alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined."
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/3/207
Both natural procreation and ART involve a process in which embryos, additional to those that will actually become children, are created only to die.
The risk of dying (approximately 80%) is inherent to the embryo’s nature. It is not as if the same embryo could have been created without that chance of dying.
http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:IQhcY1sfGLwJ:www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/Resources/Cloning_StemCell/embryo_research.pdf+john+harris+embryo+loss+part+of+procreation&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
What are some of the potentially relevant moral features of natural reproduction?
1. Natural reproduction involves a very high rate of embryo loss. We have assumed that four out of five embryos perish during attempts at natural reproduction.1
2. These deaths are an unavoidable part of natural reproduction. Some of these are genetically abnormal and could never survive. But some will be genetically normal and could have survived, if uterine or other conditions were different. However, the deaths of these embryos are unavoidable given the current state of knowledge.
3. There is an alternative to natural reproduction: childlessness through contraception or abstinence.
4. Natural reproduction is voluntary. The precise fraction of embryos that
perish during natural reproduction is not crucial. Even if 99% of embryo perished during natural reproduction, embryo rightists and other defenders of natural reproduction would go on regardless. What is crucial is that the practice necessarily involves some embryos dying and some surviving.
http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:J_zZsHzaJhMJ:www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/Resources/Cloning_StemCell/creation_lottery_harris_savulescu.pdf+john+harris+embryo+loss+part+of+procreation&cd=13&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Even nature does not think embryos are as valuable as born people. The vast majority (up to 80%) of fertilized eggs and embryos die before they are born. This has nothing to do with abortion, birth control, or any other reason. This happens in every fertile, sexually active woman:
"PROF. SANDEL: [W]hat percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost?
DR. OPITZ: The answer to your first question is that it is enormous. Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost."
In my own lab in Helena where I did all of the autopsies on all
pregnancy losses for 18 years, the rate of chromosome abnormalities was a
little bit higher.
http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/jan03/session1.html
In fact, the numbers of embryos lost are so huge, they make abortion pale in comparison.
Natural procreation causes more embryo loss than abortion:
"The rate of natural embryo loss after conception in unassisted human reproduction is high, some suggest as high as 80 percent, and the fact of natural loss is fairly well known, so that persons who engage in or permit the pursuit of conception through unassisted reproduction are knowingly bringing about the conception of many embryos that will die.
Moreover, they suggest, the high rate of natural embryo loss should bring into question the views of those who believe that early-stage human embryos merit equal treatment with human children and adults. If so many die in the natural course of things, how do we not treat natural procreation as a great fountain of tragedy and carnage? They argue that the natural rate of embryo loss, and our response to it, should teach us something about the limited significance of human embryos in the earliest stages."
We generally do not regard this embryo loss as unacceptably tragic or
engage in great efforts to avert it, or to find ways to diminish it.
http://www.bioethics.gov/background/monitor_stem_cell.html
"We now know that for every successful pregnancy which results in a live birth, many, perhaps as many as five, early embryos will be lost or 'miscarry' (although these are not perhaps miscarriages' as the term is normally used, because this sort of very early embryo loss is almost always entirely unnoticed).
How are we to think of the decision to have a child in the light of these facts? One obvious and inescapable conclusion is that God and/or nature has ordained that 'spare' embryos be produced for almost every pregnancy, and that most of these will have to die in order that a sibling embryo can come to birth. Thus the sacrifice of embryos seems to be an inescapable and inevitable part of the process of procreation. .**"
http://richarddawkins.net/article,157,Collateral-Damage-1-Embryos-and-Stem-Cell-Research,Richard-Dawkins
If you truly value each embryo as much as each born child, then you would have to be against anyone ever having another child, because more embryos die than are ever born, so the bottom line is, you kill more unborn children than ever get born, just in the process of trying to have a born child.
If your first reaction is that, well, that loss is really just part of nature, and so it's not that bad, then I ask you this:
If it is ok that up to 9 embryos die for every child born, would it be ok if some of your born children died while we were trying to conceive another?
OF COURSE NOT, RIGHT? But why? Their deaths would just be part of nature, exactly equivalent to the embryos that die so that one can be born, right?
The answer is, no one really values an embryo as much as they do a born child, no matter what they think.
http://wingnutwatch.typepad.com/wingnutwatch/2009/11/why-i-am-pro-choice-second-edition.html
High rates of embryonic loss, yet high incidence of multiple births in human art: is this paradoxical?
C. Racowsky
Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Available online 12 February 2002.
Abstract
Humans have low natural fecundity, as the probability of establishing a viable conception in any one menstrual cycle is 20–25% for a healthy, fertile couple. There are numerous underlying causes for this low rate of human fertility, not the least of which are intrinsic abnormalities within the oocyte and/or embryo, which likely account for greater than 50% of failed conceptions. During assisted reproduction technology (ART) interventions, controlled ovarian stimulation is used to obtain several oocytes in attempts to increase the likelihood of having at least one developmentally competent embryo available for transfer.
Author Keywords: human IVF; embryonic loss; embryo selection techniques; and multiple birth rate
Article Outline
• References
Theriogenology
Volume 57, Issue 1, 1 January 2002, Pages 87-96
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TCM-454DXDV-7&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F01%2F2002&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1291151342&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4d4e87c8a737c2ffef50f30b3d463151
70% embryo loss first trimester
http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/1/3/185
John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President's Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed.
About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.
A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?
http://reason.com/archives/2004/12/22/is-heaven-populated-chiefly-by
July 14, 2004
Sandel on stem cells
Michael Sandel has a good article in this week's NEJM. Sandel provides a particularly well-written version of the arguments the "embryos are people" arguments against embryonic stem cells:
Third, defenders of in vitro fertilization point out that embryo loss in assisted reproduction is less frequent than in natural pregnancy, in which more than half of all fertilized eggs either fail to implant or are otherwise lost. This fact highlights a further difficulty with the view that equates embryos and persons. If natural procreation entails the loss of some embryos for every successful birth, perhaps we should worry less about the loss of embryos that occurs in in vitro fertilization and stem-cell research. Those who view embryos as persons might reply that high infant mortality would not justify infanticide. But the way we respond to the natural loss of embryos suggests that we do not regard this event as the moral or religious equivalent of the death of infants. Even those religious traditions that are the most solicitous of nascent human life do not mandate the same burial rituals and mourning rites for the loss of an embryo as for the death of a child. Moreover, if the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions; alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined.
Even critics of stem-cell research hesitate to embrace the full implications of the embryo objection. President George W. Bush has prohibited federal funding for research on embryonic stem-cell lines derived after August 9, 2001, but has not sought to ban such research, nor has he called on scientists to desist from it. And as the stem-cell debate heats up in Congress, even outspoken opponents of embryo research have not mounted a national campaign to ban in vitro fertilization or to prohibit fertility clinics from creating and discarding excess embryos. This does not mean that their positions are unprincipled only that their positions cannot rest on the principle that embryos are inviolable.
http://www.rtfm.com/movabletype/archives/2004_07.html
It is independently corroborated by the fact that the monozygotic twin conception rate at the very beginning is much, much higher than the birth rate and then if you follow with amniocentesis, the presence of the two sacs in about 80 percent of cases,the second sac disappears, one of the sacs disappears.
http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/jan03/session1.html
NFP Kills More Embryos Than Abortion
Those who worry about early embryonic death should be as concerned about the rhythm method as they are about other forms of contraception, like Plan B, and about embryonic stem cell research, he asserts.Natural family planning is the more widely used, contemporary term for the broad range of techniques aimed at helping women to predict fertile days so they can avoid having sex then. These techniques may rely on cues like the presence of cervical mucus or small changes in body temperature, which occur
around the time of ovulation. Dr. Bovens notes that some couples choose this approach because they worry that other forms of contraception, like birth control pills, may act in part by preventing an early embryo from implanting in the womb.
However, if a fertilized egg produced on the fringe of the fertile window is less likely to develop and implant, he writes, "the same logic that turned pro-lifers away from morning after pills, I.U.D.'s and pill usage should make them nervous about the rhythm method."
Dr. Bovens also contends that opponents of abortion ought to favor barrier methods, like condoms, because these are likely to cause fewer embryonic deaths. "Even a policy of
practicing condom usage and having an abortion in case of failure would cause less embryonic deaths than the rhythm method," he writes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/health/13rhyt.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
If it is callous to use a technique that makes embryonic death likely by making the uterine wall inhospitable to implantation, then clearly it is callous to use a technique that makes embryonic death likely by organising one’s sex life so that conceived ova lack resilience and will face a uterine wall that is inhospitable to implantation.
http://civilliberty.about.com/b/2006/08/28/the-rhythm-method-as-abortifacient-a-response-to-john-b-shea.htm
Plan B Causes Less Embryo Loss than not Using it.
Nevertheless, even if in some cases ECPs work by inhibiting subsequent implantation of a fertilized egg, these probably would be outnumbered by other cases in which fertilization of an egg that would not have subsequently implanted naturally is prevented because ECPs inhibited ovulation. Therefore, on balance, ECPs probably reduce the incidence of fertilized eggs that do not subsequently implant.
http://ec.princeton.edu/questions/ec-review.pdf
I've been wondering lately if anything has been written about the effect that anti-abortion propaganda has on the prevalence to violence in the political right. Do you know of any studies? If I believed that babies were being murdered, that the government was allowing it, and that "liberals" were responsible, it would certainly motivate me to violence. Couldn't their anti-abortion propaganda be the major driving force behind the mindset of the extreme right?
Posted by: Mike | July 29, 2009 at 10:13 AM