According to Marquis, the present possession of a “future likeours” is all that is required to consider an entity as having aright to life. He points out that this could include some beingsthat we don’t normally consider as having that status, such as afew non-human animals. It most certainly, he argues, includes ahuman fetus or embryo.
This raises a challenging question in an era where thousands ofcouples take part each year in the practice of in-vitrofertilization, during which numerous embryos are fertilizedexternal to the woman’s body. During a given cycle a few — fromtwo to five, usually — are transferred to the woman’s body inhopes a normal pregnancy will result, and the remaining embryos arefrozen and cryogenically stored. The result is that there arehundreds of thousands of embryos on ice at any given time in theU.S. alone.
There are several options for what couples may do with thoseembryos:
- save them for later pregnancy attempts of their own
- donate them to other couples
- donate them to research
- have them destroyed
If Marquis’ argument about the relevance of presently possessinga certain kind of future is correct, however, it may be that ourmoral options for what to do with unneeded IVF embryos areseriously restricted. There may be no non-arbitrary distinctionbetween ourselves, a human fetus, and a frozen human embryo on hisaccount. Carefully explain why that would be. Do you agree? Why orwhy not?
