Jamie and Piper

Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

It’s a scenario that was once the stuff of sci fi novels – a "leftover" embryo who was conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) and “adopted” by another couple who brings her to life – meets up with her biological sister a decade later.

The Daily Mail is reporting on the story of Jamie Benassi, 10, and her sister, Piper Joseph, 9. The two did not become siblings in the natural way, but were both created in a laboratory as a result of her parents’ choice of IVF to cure their infertility. After Jamie was born, Allison and Tom Benassi of Newtown, Ohio decided to donate their “leftover” embryos to David and Rhonda Joseph from La Grange, Kentucky who gave birth to Piper a year later.

Now nine years old, Piper had been told about the circumstances surrounding her birth and was naturally curious about her origins. She told her adopted parents that she would like to meet her biological parents and family. The Josephs contacted the Benassis who agreed to a meeting which could only take place after they told their daughter about how her life came about.

“We just sat her down and explained she had a biological sister and they wanted to meet us, and she was all for it,” he told WCPO. “As soon as they saw each other and met each other, it was just instant togetherness - two sisters immediately. It was just as if they’ve been together all their lives.”

They have, in a way. Both girls are children of the same parents and share a connection that reaches to their DNA. That connection was only severed by the use of unnatural methods of reproduction.

Although the press is making this story into the stuff of a Disney movie, they do so at the expense of the dark reality that lurks behind the scenes.

First of all, when Allison and Tom participated in IVF, Alison had multiple eggs harvested from her ovaries, which were fertilized with sperm from her husband. This resulted in the creation of multiple embryos “in order to ensure the best possible chance of conception,” the Mail reports.

These are not “best possible chances of conception” - they are living human beings who will either be frozen indefinitely and eventually destroyed, or implanted along with other embryos into an adoptive mother.

Many experts say that at present, there are nearly a million of these tiny frozen lives existing in storage facilities around the world while their parents decide what, if anything, to do with them.

Some couples simply choose to have them destroyed. Paul Ford of Elle.com, who refers to his leftover embryos as “cells”, writes in this article about his experience with IVF and frozen embryos, “ . . . [W]hen we asked the doctor what would happen [if they chose to destroy the embryos], she shrugged again, as if to say: They just thaw. You take them out of the freezer, throw them out with the medical waste. That's that.”

Others have them frozen indefinitely and pay something like $50 per embryo a year to keep them alive. “It's a pretty good business; think of the $1,200 a year we pay. So it could come to something like $600 million a year in freezing," Ford writes.

Then there are couples who want to donate to research but, as Ford discovered, “It also turns out there isn't a huge need for embryo donations. According to researchers, there are more than 1,000 stem-cell lines in play in the medical-research community. They don't need that many more.”

Some mothers will have their embryos implanted during an infertile time so that they will naturally pass out of the body, while others will choose to allow someone to adopt their “leftovers”, such as what the Benassis did.

But even this is fraught with difficulty. “I do worry that the person who gets our cells will be one of the mean, judgmental parents, critical of other mothers, critical of the child," Ford admits.

The children born of these arrangements have their own issues, such as growing up feeling like a manufactured product rather than the result of an act of love. This group, known as AnonymousUs, gives a forum to children like Piper who may be troubled by the thought that they were considered a “leftover” while another sibling was not.

All of the above makes it obvious why the Church forbids the use of IVF. In Donum Vitae we are taught that if a medical intervention helps or assists the marriage act to achieve pregnancy, it is licit; if the intervention replaces the marriage act in order to engender life, it is not moral. Because IVF creates a child in a petri dish, and it leads to all of the above mentioned issues, this form of reproductive technology is forbidden.

But what about the innocent embryos created during this process? Isn’t it worthy to allow them to be brought to life by a willing couple?

This question was dealt with in the document, Dignitas Personae, which stated: “It has also been proposed, solely in order to allow human beings to be born who are otherwise condemned to destruction, that there could be a form of “prenatal adoption”. This proposal, praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life, presents however various problems . . .”

Theologians are split as to whether or not this means embryo adoption is licit or not.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says, “The document raises cautions or problems about these new issues but does not formally make a definitive judgment against them.”

However, theologians such as Dr. John Haas of the National Catholic Bioethics Center point to statements in the document that appear to say otherwise, such as:

“The proposal that these embryos could be put at the disposal of infertile couples as a treatment for infertility is not ethically acceptable for the same reasons which make artificial heterologous procreation illicit as well as any form of surrogate motherhood,” the document states. “This practice would also lead to other problems of a medical, psychological and legal nature.”

Dignitas Personae sums up the situation clearly and precisely - and without any semblance of the fairy-tale notions being promoted by the media.

" . . . [I]t needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved.”

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