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Some thoughtful observers saw the work as still another ominous step toward further control and manipulation of basic life processes — comparable perhaps to the recently acquired ability of molecular biologists to rearrange and recombine genes of different creatures and even to create new life forms. These critics are not really worried about the imminence of Huxley-style baby hatcheries that produce everything from superbrainy "Alphas" to dronelike "Epsilons." After all, says one researcher, "test-tube babies are not going to be popping out like peanuts." Rather the concern centers on the far-ranging social, ethical and legal repercussions. In the words of Nobel Laureate James Watson, there is the potential for "all sorts of bad scenarios." What, for instance, could prevent a scientist from taking a fertilized egg from one woman, who perhaps did not want to carry her own baby, and implanting it in the womb of a surrogate. Who then would be the child's legal mother? Or, in the words of an old joke, "Which one gets the Mother's Day card?"
By a striking coincidence, the first legal reverberations from test-tube fertilization were being felt last week. In U.S. district court in New York, a jury of four women and two men was hearing testimony in an unusual $1.5 million damage suit against Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and its chief of obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Raymond Vande Wiele. The action was brought by a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., dentist, Dr. John Del Zio, 59, and his wife Doris, 34. Despite several operations, Mrs. Del Zio had apparently been unable to become pregnant because of tubal problems. In 1972, she agreed to let Dr. Landrum Shettles place in her womb an egg said to have been fertilized externally by her husband's sperm. But upon learning of the experiment in his department, Vande Wiele destroyed the specimen, contending that the procedure was risky, that Shettles lacked the skills to undertake it and that it had not been approved by the hospital's committee on human experimentation.
In emotional, sobbing testimony, Mrs. Del Zio charged that Vande Wiele's action robbed her of a chance to have a child by her current husband (she had one child in a previous marriage before the tubal problems), damaged her both physically and psychologically, upset her sex life and jeopardized her marriage. The defense, for its part, questions whether the flamboyant Shettles, who has since left the hospital, ever managed to fertilize Mrs. Del Zio's egg and whether his other claims of in-vitro fertilization were valid. Scornfully, a defense lawyer said Shettles' work was as different from the achievement of Steptoe and Edwards as "a Model T Ford is from a Porsche."
The courtroom histrionics tended to obscure the real question in the case: Was Vande Wiele's action, which he freely admits, medically and legally justifiable, and did Mrs. Del Zio's emotional and physical problems stem from any trauma she might have suffered from learning of the destruction of her ovum? Should the jury find for Mrs. Del Zio, doctors involved in such experiments will have to weigh carefully their legal liabilities before considering these new procedures.