To the Editor:
Re “The Embryo Question Can’t Be Ignored,” by Anna Louie Sussman (Opinion guest essay, April 13):
I was miscarrying, again, when I drove to Montgomery, Ala., last year in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling that frozen embryos are children, which shut down nearly all I.V.F. services in our state, although some have resumed thanks to a law offering some protection.
I hoped my voice could help restore access to I.V.F. and my last hope for a baby in my arms. As I spoke with lawmakers, my thoughts were on the dimming embryo inside me, only a step or two farther along the path to birth than those embryos subject to legislation.
Fertility patients know better than anyone the feeling that embryos are something special: more than property, less than a child, clumps of just a few cells that carry the weight of enormous potential for joy and pain.
But in Alabama, we learned firsthand the legal dangers of personifying these microscopic clusters of hope, and I have moved my fertility treatment out of state, where I can be assured that (aside from cruel biology) no one will decide the fate of my embryos but me.
Sarah Crites
Auburn, Ala.
To the Editor:
The recent piece on embryo screening technologies paints a chilling portrait of a future where human beings are reduced to risk scores before they ever take a breath and ranked for desirability and destroyed if seen as “unfit.” This is not progress. It is eugenics.
Polygenic embryo screening, especially if used to select for traits like intelligence, height or emotional temperament, crosses an ethical line that should never be blurred. It revives the dehumanizing logic that some lives are more valuable than others and treats human lives as disposable.
Every human life, from the moment of fertilization, has inherent dignity, worth and a unique purpose. We do not become valuable because we are wanted, or because our genes meet someone’s standards. We are valuable because we are human.
The child with a genetic predisposition to disease is not less worthy. The embryo with a risk score for depression is not less human. And the daughter conceived without a curated genome is not defective — she is exactly as she should be: a whole, valuable human being, not a product to be engineered.
This technology may be framed as choice, but it creates a marketplace of life where the weakest can be discarded. No amount of venture capital or Silicon Valley optimism can sanitize that.
True compassion does not eliminate suffering by eliminating those who might suffer. It means welcoming and protecting every life, especially the tiniest and most vulnerable.
Lila Rose
Los Angeles
The writer is the founder and chief executive of Live Action, a group that opposes abortion and I.V.F.
To the Editor:
I appreciate your thorough presentation to your readers about the important topic of I.V.F. I devoted an hour on Sunday morning to reading all 11 pages, which left me with more questions than answers.
One question not addressed, which seems important to any decisions about the moral aspects of creating and dealing with human embryos, is whether personhood is rightly equated with a body. That seems to be the prevailing sense in our highly materialistic culture.
I personally believe that the body is more a vehicle, like a car, for our spirit to use during our earthly experience. To continue this metaphor: An embryo is more like a car being built in a factory and not yet inhabited.
I cannot say when personhood begins, but I do not believe that a one-day-old fertilized egg, which has yet to develop into a viable embryo, has a personality and a soul. For states to grant full personhood to a fertilized egg degrades the respect for full human life that live babies deserve over potential babies.
Adele Tyler
Nashville
To the Editor:
I’m a mom of two, and from the earliest months of my 4-year-old’s life, we knew she wouldn’t have a typical development journey. After years of specialists and tests, we learned recently that she has a rare genetic disorder.
I love my daughter and wouldn’t change a thing about her. I’m proud of her persistence through countless hours of therapy to learn to walk and begin to speak. Being her parents has been a great blessing.
It breaks my heart that under other circumstances the testing described in the essay might have robbed her of a chance at life. Parents don’t realize what they are missing when they choose traditional “success” and never give themselves the chance to experience the wonder and grace of just embracing the dignity of a person for his or her own sake.
We didn’t do any in utero genetic testing for our second child, now a baby. We’ve realized how irrelevant it is to how we love our children and welcome them into this world.
Joanna Williams
Tucson, Ariz.
To the Editor:
After I read Anna Louie Sussman’s riveting and thought-provoking essay, my imagination went to Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel “Never Let Me Go,” in which cloned people are grown and used as adults for organ replacement.
If only the wealthy can optimize embryos, what happens to the rest of humanity? And what about those of us who, in spite of possible preventable genetic conditions, find our entire “arete” (an ancient Greek term meaning “excellence” or “virtue”) or raison d’être in working with and through those very limitations?
I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at 18, a condition that derailed my career as a dancer for 10 years. After lifesaving surgery and hard work rebuilding my body and ballet technique, I returned to dance at 29. That experience of loss and recovery became the basis for my entire professional life, first as a movement therapist helping injured and neurologically limited dancers move, and now as a licensed professional counselor specializing in chronic illness and disability.
Human creativity and achievement are more often than not the product of limitation. Maybe we should look to “The Birth-Mark,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, as another cautionary tale, in which a scientist, trying to make his beloved more perfect, removes a birthmark and ends up killing her.
Lavinia Magliocco
Portland, Ore.
