This week's BioNews reports on news that two women have lost a legal challenge to the use of their embryos without the consent of their former partners. Natallie Evans and Lorraine Hadley want to use the frozen embryos to try for their own babies even though their former partners - the men who provided the sperm - no longer want to have a child with them. The fact that these women have no other way of having a biologically related child makes the situation seem all the more unfair. But can the law be expected to resolve such situations?
When the case originally came to court, their lawyer, Muiris Lyons, said 'If they got pregnant naturally and the embryos were in their bodies then their respective partners would not have any say at all... The law needs to take into account why they should be effectively discriminated against because they're infertile.' The judge, however, took a different view.
Justice Wall also noted that the 1990 law is very clear on the issue of consent and for good reasons. The providers of the eggs and of the sperm must both give their written consent for the storage and use of their embryos. If one of them changes his or her mind, the consent is nullified and the embryos must be removed from storage and destroyed. Nothing has changed since the law came into being. Embryo freezing was available at the time and the potential for conflict between couples who separate in between the storage and the use of the embryos in treatment remains the same.
Contrary to the claims of the two women's lawyers, the law is not discriminatory in this instance. It is nature which discriminates between those who can have children naturally and those who cannot. Reproductive science and the laws which govern it can help to overcome an obstacle imposed by nature, but they cannot overcome rifts in personal relationships. The only solution to this seemingly intractable problem is an agreement between the women and their respective former partners. The women may find themselves in unlucky situations, but there's no legal remedy for that.
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