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In Britain two years ago, Parliament established a 16-member committee of experts under Dame Mary Warnock to examine the social, ethical and legal implications of the new technology. Among its recommendations published in July: all clinics providing infertility services such as AID, IVF or egg donation should be licensed and regulated; research on embryos up to 14 days old could be permitted, also under license and regulation; but the use of surrogate mothers should be forbidden because such arrangements are "liable to moral objection." Critics on all sides did not hesitate to attack. A Roman Catholic spokesman called the practice of AID "morally unacceptable," while a newspaper columnist denounced restrictions on pregnancy as "ludicrously inconsistent." But unless such differences are settled, warned Sir John Peel, former president of the British Medical Association, society will confront "the brink of something almost like the atomic bomb."
The most striking illustration of Europe's legal confusion is the case of Corinne Parpalaix, 22, a secretary in the Marseille police department, whose husband died of cancer last year after depositing sperm in a sperm bank. Parpalaix asked for the sperm so that she could be impregnated with it, but the bank refused on the grounds that the dead man had left no instructions on what he wanted done. The press clucked; the church frowned; Parpalaix sued.
French law offered little guidance, and so the whole case rested on exquisitely philosophical arguments about what the dead man's frozen sperm really was. An organ transplant? An inheritable piece of property? State Prosecutor Yves Lesec, siding with the sperm bank, argued that it was part of the dead man's body, even though separated from that body. The dead man had a basic right to "physical integrity," the prosecutor concluded, saying in effect that his widow had no more right to his sperm than to his feet or ears. Not so, retorted Parpalaix's lawyer. The deposited sperm, he argued, — implied a contract. Somewhat to the surprise of legal experts, the court last month agreed, ruling that this "secretion containing the seeds of life" should be given to Parpalaix. "I'll call him Thomas," she said of her prospective infant. "He'll be a pianist. That's what his father wanted."
There are elements of absurdity in such a controversy, and yet it derives quite directly from a broader question that is not absurd at all: When does human life begin? At the moment of conception, say many conservatives, both religious and secular. The Rev. Donald McCarthy, of the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center in St. Louis, argued sweepingly before the congressional hearings that there is "no evidence of a threshold, a starting point other than fertilization itself, for the beginning of human nature." This is a standard argument against abortion, but McCarthy used it to endow every new embryo with a panoply of civil rights. These included a right not to be frozen, a right not to be experimented on, a right not to be destroyed, even a right not to be created at all except as a consequence of "personal self-giving and conjugal love."