The Stem Cell

Louisiana earned a bright orange ranking in our StateWatch list of US stem cell legislation (for the full series of posts, navigate to StateWatch using the file cloud on the upper right).

There are a handful of states with laws on their books from the 1970’s and early 1980’s, written in fearful reaction to Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion. In Louisiana, the “embryo statutes” define two-four day old embryos as human and give them the same rights and interests as children. The definition springs from a narrow notion of personhood: Southern conservatives argue that a person exists at conception: a fertilized egg, a single cell embryo—is the same as a child.

In Louisiana, unwanted, spare embryos become wards of fertility doctors, who are charged with keeping them “safe” until they can be “adopted” and implanted elsewhere. This ignores the fact that the vast majority of embryos are never given to other couples. A recent post by an IVF physician at docinthemachine.com says:

“My personal experience is that almost no patients ever request that their spare embryos be donated to other couples. The vast majority simply prefer to leave them in frozen limbo in storage indefinitely – avoiding having to make a final decision of what to do with them. As a result of the enormous expense and liability this poses to the clinics, private companies are forming (ed: see TSCB’s Stem Cell Banks series of posts) to store the embryos off-site…Why don’t more couples choose to donate to other couples? I believe it’s a mixture of fear of the unknown (who the parents will be, would they ever run into their donated child?) and lack of information regarding the process.”

So most embryos sit in freezers. For the citizens of Louisiana, the logical upshot is rampant child abuse: homeless children languishing in frozen perpetuity. Why isn’t there a rash of lawsuits on behalf of these icy corpuscles? Because most Americans, including many Louisianans, believe that an embryo is neither person nor child.

Jessica Arons at the Center for American Progress has an excellent analysis of the Louisiana statues, called Sex, Lies and Embryos.

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