Embryonic research could be next target after ‘Roe’

Two weeks after the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, Ye Yuan heard from a woman who wanted to reverse her decision to donate her embryos to scientific research. The woman — who contacted Yuan anonymously through a fertility consultant — feared that if the law in Colorado changed and it became illegal to dispose of or experiment with human embryos, she would be forced to use hers indefinitely. time to freeze. Could a law change in a year or five to prevent her from having the last word on what happened to them?

In states where research on human embryos is legal, people undergoing IVF are often given the choice to donate excess fertilized embryos to scientific research. These are sometimes used to look for possible treatments for diseases such as diabetes or, as in Yuan’s case, to explore ways to make IVF more successful. “Those discarded embryos are really one of the most important parts for us to maintain the high quality of our platform here,” said Yuan, director of research at the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine (CCRM). But in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, he worries that people will be less likely to donate their spare embryos for research and that embryonic research could eventually become the next target of anti-abortion activists.

“It’s like being a little girl living in a dark room. You know there are bad guys out there, but don’t worry too much because the door is locked,” Yuan says. “But then someone tells you the door is unlocked.” Yuan fears that anything that delays access to human embryos will eventually slow progress in IVF, which accounts for between 1 and 2 percent of all U.S. births each year.

Judge Samuel Alito’s majority opinion doesn’t call IVF or human embryonic research, but his choice of words to describe abortion could be seen as applicable to embryos outside the body, says Glenn Cohen, a bioethicist and law professor. at Harvard Law School. The right to abortion is different from other rights, Alito notes in the opinion, because it destroys “potential life” and the life of an “unborn human.”

“The same thing he uses to differentiate abortion seems to me fully applicable to distinguishing embryos,” says Cohen. “To me, after Dobbs, it makes it very, very clear that any state that wants to ban the destruction of embryos as part of research is free to do so.”

The wording lawmakers use to describe the beginning of human life is also important. In at least nine states, trigger laws — pieces of legislation designed to restrict abortion soon after Roe’s fall — include language implying that an egg becomes an “unborn child” or “unborn human” at the precise moment of conception. In other words, according to these definitions, any human embryo – including donated embryos that can be used for scientific research – is an unborn child. While most of these trigger laws apply specifically to pregnancy and thus don’t regulate embryos outside the human body, the idea that life begins at the time of fertilization could be used to direct embryonic research, Cohen says. “If you have that opinion, it’s not clear to me why you would exempt the destruction of embryos if you ban abortion. To me, that injustice is the same.”

This post Embryonic research could be next target after ‘Roe’

was original published at “https://www.wired.com/story/roe-wade-embryo-research/”