Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 154: Cowboys, Infertility and Deeper Moral Questions

“Making Sense of Bioethics” CMS RSS

Subscriptions to this series, as well as reprints, are available from the NCBC for newspapers, parish bulletins, newsletters, or journals. For information regarding subscriptions and permissions, please contact Elizabeth Lee.

Most people still remember the story of Nadya Suleman, dubbed “Octo­mom,” a single woman who used in vitro fertiliza­tion to become preg­nant with eight babies simultane­ously. Suleman had asked her fertility specialist, Dr. Michael Kamrava, to implant at least a dozen em­bryos into her uterus, leading to the birth of the famous octuplets in 2009. Dr. Kam­rava’s medical license was later re­voked by the California Medi­cal Board. In commenting on the case, Judith Alvarado, Deputy Attor­ney General in California, con­cluded that Dr. Kamrava had acted “like a cowboy” in ignoring fertility indus­try guidelines.

When it comes to the “wild west” of infertility — a field of medi­cine with little oversight and unbri­dled profit margins — there are a lot of cowboys out there.

Recently there was the case of Kelli Rowlette who, after having her own DNA analyzed in 2017 through a genealogy website, shockingly discov­ered that her bio­logical father was actually a fertility specialist who had once treated her mother. With­out her mother’s knowledge or con­sent, the specialist had used his own sperm to impreg­nate her, while falsely claiming he was using a mix­ture of sperm from her husband (who had low sperm count) and a do­nor who was sup­posed to have been an anony­mous university stu­dent with features similar to her hus­band.

Another infamous case in­volved Bertold Wiesner who, back in the 1940s, established a fertility clinic in London to help women strug­gling to conceive. His clinic suppos­edly relied on a small num­ber of highly intelligent men to serve as sperm donors for artificial insemina­tion, with more than 1500 babies being born. More than seventy years later, based on DNA testing of people who had been conceived at the clinic, it turned out that as many as 600 of the babies born may have relied on sperm from Mr. Wiesner himself.

There was also the troubling story of Dr. Cecil Jacobson of Fair­fax County, Virginia. He was ac­cused of a "purposeful pattern of deceit" during the 1980’s when he fathered up to 75 children us­ing his own sperm for artificial insemina­tion with his female pa­tients. He was eventually sen­tenced to five years in prison and had his medical license revoked.

Another notorious episode re­lied on DNA testing and other evi­dence gathered by police in Bra­zil. They discovered that many of the 8,000 babies born after IVF treat­ments at the clinic of Dr. Roger Abdelmassih in Sao Paulo were not genetically related to the cou­ples who were raising them. Authori­ties believe that Abdelmassih misled many of his clients during the 1990s and early 2000s and impreg­nated them with embryos formed from other peo­ple’s eggs and sperm, in a bid to im­prove his clinic’s statis­tics for success­ful implantations and births.

Yet another nefarious incident in­volved Doctors Ricardo Asch, Jose Bul­maceda and Sergio Stone, three fertil­ity specialists and faculty mem­bers at the University of California at Ir­vine who ran a campus fertility clinic dur­ing the 1990s. They were accused of fertilizing eggs they had harvested from women and implant­ing the result­ing embryos into unre­lated women, as well as selling some of the em­bryos to scientists and re­searchers. Doz­ens of women and couples filed law­suits against the doctors and the univer­sity. 

One of the reasons these acts of decep­tion by fertility specialists are so offen­sive to us is that we realize how the procreation of our own children is meant to involve a strict exclusivity be­tween husband and wife. When­ever we violate that exclusivity by hiring outsid­ers to produce our off­spring in clin­ics, or engage strang­ers to provide their sex cells for these procedures, unthinka­ble outcomes become possi­ble. 

The plethora of these cases also re­minds us how many of the cavalier ap­proaches to human procreation be­ing promoted by the fertility industry are unethical at their core. We are witness­ing an unprecedented bur­geon­ing of laboratory techniques for manufacturing human life, many of which are deeply antagonistic to hu­man dignity and contrary to the pa­ren­tal obligations assumed by spouses when they marry.

The natural exclusivity intended in parenthood is meant to afford protec­tion, security about our origins, and the safety of the home hearth. In the headlong rush to achieve a preg­nancy at any price, many couples, regretta­bly, are allowing hawkish business­men to manipulate their sex cells, create their children in glass­ware, store them in frozen orphan­ages, and even discard them like medical waste. 

The tragic fallout of these deci­sions should reignite our natural moral sensibili­ties, and point us back in the direc­tion of the Creator’s plan for hu­man procreation. Our children are truly safeguarded in the dignity of their ori­gins when they are brought into the world exclusively within the marital em­brace of husband and wife. Turn­ing to the lawlessness of modern day fertil­ity “cowboys,” meanwhile, is a quick study for violation and heart­ache.

 Copyright © 2020, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, PA. All rights reserved.

---