When Does Parenthood Begin?

by Daniel Avila

Recently in the case of A.Z. v. B.Z. the highest judicial body in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court, prohibited a wife from implanting embryos frozen at the four-cell stage after the husband changed his mind and withdrew his earlier consent. The unanimous court characterized implantation in such circumstances as forced procreation and announced that it would not compel an individual to become a parent (A.Z. v. B.Z., No. SJC-0898 [Mass. March 31, 2000]).

But hadn’t conception already occurred through the in vitro fertilization process used by the couple to produce the embryos? Shouldn’t the fact that the husband willingly donated his sperm for the procedure preclude any finding of maternal force or judicial compulsion? Doesn’t the embryos’ existence mean that the husband and wife were already parents?

The court failed even to acknowledge these and other important questions—such as the issue of when human life begins. Instead, it submerged them within a preliminary discussion of the case’s background that asserted the following as fact without offering any explanation or argument. We use the term ‘preembryo’ to refer to the four-to-eight cell stage of the developing fertilized egg, and Using one or more of these preembryos, it is possible that the wife could conceive. That’s it. The court sidestepped entirely all of the philosophical, medical, and moral controversies generated by the frozen embryo debate. Instead, it posited, as if it were an incontestable fact, that conception, and therefore parenthood, would not transpire unless and until implantation occurred.

This rendered the court’s legal task exceedingly simple: other laws and court decisions in Massachusetts served as precedents for the idea that individuals shall not be compelled to enter into intimate family relationships, and ... the law shall not be used as a mechanism for forcing such relationships when they are not desired. In other words, if the husband does not want to be a father, and since the court will not treat him legally as a father, despite the embryos’ existence, then the wife loses—end of case. The embryos would have to be thawed and left to die or else destroyed. As long as the husband objected to becoming a parent, the wife could not implant them.

Ramifications of A.Z. v. B.Z.

For the first time for legal purposes, a court has redefined conception by severing the term’s biological association with the fertilization of sperm and oocyte. The A.Z. v. B.Z. decision will boost the long-running campaign to designate implantation as the official moment of conception, a campaign that was launched by Planned Parenthood and joined by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the 1960s. The legal assist comes none too soon, in light of evidence showing that even ACOG’s own membership has not consistently adopted the organization’s redefinition efforts and continues to abide by definitions ... more consistent with lay and embryologist definitions. (J.A. Spinnato, "Informed consent and the redefining of conception: a decision ill-conceived?," Journal of Maternal-Fetal Medicine 264 [Nov.-Dec. 1998]).

A quick survey of popular sources reveals widespread acceptance of the biologically correct definition of conception, not the politically correct one. The heavily visited web sites epregnancy.com and pregnancytoday.com inform parents and parents-to-be that conception refers to the union of the sperm and the ovum and thus, at conception, when the sperm penetrates the egg, a new life has been created. The 18th and latest edition of Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, also available on the web, defines conception as The union of the male sperm and female ovum; fertilization, making no reference whatsoever to implantation.

Now, apparently, with the Massachusetts court leading the way, the heavy artillery of judicial decrees will be brought into the reeducation battle to goad an obstinate and obviously misinformed public to abandon its fixation on biological realities.

Even if they do not win the definitional battle, the revisionists have already sown the ground for confusion. One cannot simply assert that human life begins at conception, as the Holy Father again did recently in his address before an international congress on the Fetus as a Patient, without raising the possibility that such a statement will be misapplied by others to mean implantation, not fertilization (John Paul II, "Fetal life must be protected and nurtured," L’Osservatore Romano 2 [English weekly ed.], April 5, 2000).

By ruling as it did, the court in A.Z. v. B.Z. freed biological parents in Massachusetts from any legal obligations towards their extra-uterine offspring (since by necessary logic the yet-to-be conceived fall outside the law’s protection). Consistent with this result, couples may, as long as they are in agreement, decide to implant their embryos, discard them, or sell them for research. Implications for Parenthood

The court did something else that may eventually influence the direction of the abortion controversy and even determine the outcome of the infanticide debate. It turned the issue in the frozen embryo case from the biological question when does life begin? to the legal question of when does legal parenthood begin?

Apparently, as far as the court was concerned, it did not matter that the husband had begotten the embryos (to beget is to bring into existence). Nor did it matter to the court whether the embryos were alive. Despite the urgings of the only two friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the case (by the Massachusetts Citizens for Life and a group of Catholic organizations including The National Catholic Bioethics Center), the court simply ignored the question and never addressed the arguments.

Instead, more important to the court was whether the husband wanted to become a parent. In effect, the desire to be in a social relationship with one’s offspring, and neither one’s role in producing the offspring nor the offspring’s biological existence, would trigger the beginning of legal parenthood. That means legal parenthood could be avoided, despite the biological realities, by simply refusing to accept one’s parenthood status. Theoretically, once the relationship between biological and legal parenthood is separated at the start of gestation, nothing can stop the courts from unstitching the relational seam up through and even past other biological connection points, including implantation and birth. That is, one’s desire to avoid becoming a parent could be used to justify late-term abortions, and even infanticide, despite the biological realities of fetal life, viability, birth, and infancy.

Abortion advocates have pointed to the unique biological burdens that pregnancy places on women and have touted the so-called liberty to abort as a necessary means for terminating pregnancy. Yet, this interest disappears once a child begins to be born. Thus, defenders of a ban against partial-birth abortions argued in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart that the Supreme Court’s abortion liberty includes only the right to terminate pregnancy, and does not include a right to make the child dead as it is being born ("Brief of Amici Curiae National Right to Life et al," at 10-16, filed February 28, 2000).

But if the so-called abortion liberty is restyled as the right not to become a parent rather than as just a means of escaping pregnancy, then partial-birth abortion becomes the only means, for some women, to avoid becoming a legal parent of an unwanted child. Killing by stabbing eliminates any risk of being mistaken as a parent of a child emerging from the womb.

As long as biology is deemed irrelevant, then why should birth and infancy matter? Parenthood begins when it is wanted, not when it is dictated by arbitrary legal references to biological stages. How unfair to deny individuals their right not to become parents when the disabilities of their newborn child were not discovered until birth or were caused at birth or thereafter, and would exhaust the adults’ time, energy, and resources! How unjust to legally impose financial and emotional burdens on men or women when they never wanted to be parents in the first place! If there is a right to kill a living offspring inside the womb in order to avoid parenthood, then what difference does the offspring’s existence, stage of development, or location make outside the womb?

This may sound far-fetched at first, but the legal precedent for careening in such a direction now exists thanks to the decision in A.Z. v. B.Z, as if the case’s immediate impact on the fate of thousands of frozen embryos in Massachusetts were not bad enough. Unfortunately, in a society like ours the chances are high that the courts will soon be asked to expand the supposed right to choose not to be a parent of existing offspring beyond the parameters of the frozen embryo case. The unanimous opinion of a well-respected court almost guarantees that other courts will take this claim seriously in a host of circumstances.

Daniel Avila, Esquire
Associate Director for Public Policy
Massachusetts Catholic Conference

© 2000 Ethics & Medics — a publication of the National Catholic Bioethics Center — www.ncbcenter.org

This item 2900 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org