Who Owns Pre-Embryos?

An anonymous reader writes: Scientifically and legally, frozen embryos are not the same as a living child. Nevertheless, they can inspire legal battles that resemble custody disputes. This article follows a case between a couple who had been dating for five months when the woman received a cancer diagnosis. Before beginning chemotherapy, she and her boyfriend of five months decided to harvest and set aside some fertilized eggs, just in case. (If the treatment saved her but destroyed her ability to have kids, and the couple stayed together and decided they wanted kids, the pre-embryos would preserve that option.) She survived, but their relationship didn't. With no explicit contract in place, the disposition/custody of the pre-embryos is now hotly contested. "[R]eading over the case, one gets the sense that there's a fundamental lack of language to describe what's at stake. There may be an emerging field of law and legal precedent, but the terms at hand don't adequately capture the nature of the dispute."

Comments

Re: Freezing Fertilized Eggs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also does anyone know why we are calling these pre-embryos? Pre-embryos would be sperm and egg cells.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proembryo#Preembryo_in_context_of_human_development

Re:Very tricky issue indeed.

[jythie]

The problem there is that one can not sign away parental responsibility by contract. The state does not allow it since the it is the child's interest that the court puts priority on, thus even if the parents reach an agreement between each other the state steps in and forces support for the benefit of the child who could not consent to the agreement.

Pre-embryo

[DrYak]

Who Owns Pre-Embryos?

From a scientist: What the fuck is a pre-embryo.

Wikipedia is your friend.

Basically:
- Bunch of cells, still disorganised (apparently, you wait until for the primitive streak to call it proper "embryo". I didn't remember that from my lectures)
- They float around, they haven't implanted into an uterus yet. (That I vaguely remember from my medical studies).

(Well, of course, they were fertilized *in vitro*. It would be hard to find an uterus to implant onto at the bottom of a test tube).