The lead from Sky News sets up the tragic disagreement:
A woman left infertile after cancer treatment says she feels "distraught" after losing a five-year legal battle to try to become a mother using her own embryos.
In 2001, Natallie Evans and Howard Johnston went through an in-vitro fertilization procedure and had six embryos created. Evans hoped to use the embryos to become a mother after she completed treatment for ovarian cancer.
Just a year later, though, Evans and Johnston had an irreconcilable split, and he was no longer willing to be the father of her children. Unfortunately, because of her cancer treatment, those embryos were her only chance to carry and give birth to her children. As a result of her loss at the European Court of Human Rights, the embryos probably will be destroyed within the month.
She said: "I am distraught at the court's decision. It is very hard for me to accept that the embryos will now be destroyed and I will never become a mother....
I would ask Howard to consider whether he could ever permit me to have the children I so dearly long for, and which he was happy to consent to when the procedure took place to create these embryos."
Johnston, on the other hand, was glad the court affirmed his argument. "I want to be able to choose when and with who I become a parent."
Evans seems to feel Johnston made that choice when he consented to create the embryos was a decision to become a parent. And there's a kind of logic to that. What did Johnston think he was choosing to do when he agreed to help create the embryos? What did he think the goal of the process was?
But Johnston is living within the letter of the current law in the United Kingdom: the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act requires consent from both man and woman at every stage of the process. Anna Smajdor, researcher in medical ethics at Imperial College, London, seems to think the letter of the law doesn't reflect real life:
No couple can guarantee an ongoing relationship, and both parties need to understand and accept that the creation of embryos together is a reproductive endeavour which cannot simply be revoked.
If this seems risky or unpalatable, consent should not be given in the first place.
Parenting, the act of creating and nurturing a child, is a project that can't be revoked. It is an unbroken flow of events extending across years. In the normal order of things, the only stage of parenting where consent can be given is at the beginning. After that, ongoing consent is not necessary — no matter how much a parent might complain "If I'd know this was what I was getting into, I'd have made some different decisions."
Only the intervention of science creates discrete "stages" at which consent must be reaffirmed. They are artificial in the most literal sense of the term: products of human artifice. For Evans, the embryos were the children she hoped for, children she was committed to bear and rear. For Johnston, those embryos were just a burden, binding him to a bad memory. Who is seeing reality clearly?
Science has created a new reality that encourages people there are places where the decision to become a parent can be revoked. Perhaps it's just the eye of this beholder, but that seems to be a rather more dangerous and uncertain environment for a growing child
