So then, what's the statute of limitations on kidnapping?

In the midst of all the fiery blastocysts are people too rhetoric, namely Sam Brownback's Interview with an Embryo (one has to wonder what sort of miscreant would tell their young child that had they not been adopted as an embryo they would have be "murdered" like the embryos being discussed during the current stem cell debates), Orange County Superior Court Judge Stephen J. Sundvold dismissed 8 cases of ova/embryo theft against UC Irvine's fertility clinic. The judge dismissed the cases because he felt the plaintiff's waited too long to file suit after the "widespread and pervasive publicity" of the clinic scandal surrounding use in the 1990's. Attorney's for the plaintiffs argue the publicity was primarily limited to Orange County, where their clients did not live - in truth, this was a pretty big scandal that received national attention (I heard about it here in Philly).

I agree that these women did seem to take an inordinately long amount of time to find out if their stored ova/embryos had been among the ones used without consent, I do think the clinic owes them something for the sheer emotional turmoil of knowing they have children out there that they did not consent to have or put up for adoption. To be honest with you, the more I learn about what's now being called "snowflake adoption", the less comfortable I am with it. Until a friend of mine went through the psychiatric eval to be allowed to donate her remaining embryos, I had thought that after the embryos were donated they went to families in a different geographic region to decrease the possibility of any resultant children born from the donation from living too close to the biological parents and their offspring. This, in turn, would significantly decrease the chances of incestuous relationships (which are never good for the population at large), etc. Much to my horror, I found out that donated ova/embryos stay in the clinic practice which means there's a possibility that your son's high school sweetheart could be his own [biological] sister.

As Art Caplan asks in this morning's Inky, if Bush and the fundagelical sheeple are really concerned with the fate of embryos created in vitro, why don't they shut down fertility clinics that destroy embryos (this, BTW, would be all of them because this sort of assisted reproduction always involves destruction of some products of conception)? The truth is, they'd loose support from not only the general public, but from many "pro-lifers" who benefit greatly from these clinics - including those who brought their healthy "snowflake" graduates (the ones they obtained because they wanted to go through a pregnancy instead of adopting a living, breathing child that was already born and in dire need of parents) to be used as visual aids for political purposes.


Tags: science; medicine; health; religion; The Bush Synod; fundamentalism

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