PHOENIX, Arizona, July 12 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A fertility clinic in the US is closing its doors and has scheduled the destruction of all of its over 500 unclaimed frozen embryos. The Arizona Institute of Reproductive Medicine ran a classified ad in The Arizona Republic newspaper asking those who “have embryos or sperms stored” at the facility to contact them. The embryos are slated for death on July 15 if unclaimed by the parents. In 1996 the first such scandal broke in England where British scientists began the mass murder of well over 3,300 human embryos when attempts to contact the parents of the frozen embryos failed. In L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican referred to the British scandal as “a pre-natal massacre” and “a new milestone for the culture of death.”
Pro-life groups across the country and around the world offered to adopt the embryos, responding to an editorial in L’Osservatore Romano, which suggested that “in extreme circumstances” pre-natal adoptions be arranged. The issue raises once again the illicit nature of in vitro fertilization. Once one accepts the truth that life begins at conception the whole concept of manipulation of and experimentation with human embryos becomes unacceptable.
The typical IVF procedure involves the extraction of a number of eggs (usually around 15 or more) from the mother which are then fertilized by sperm from the father (or donated by a third party) in a petrie dish or test-tube (hence the name “test-tube” baby). The embryos are then examined and three or four of the more promising ones are implanted into the mother in the hope that one will survive. Embryos judged to be inferior are “allowed to die”, while the remainder are frozen and thus able to be stored for later use.
With files from AP.