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Neither current law nor current custom supports such an array of rights, however. On the contrary, a pregnant woman's right of decision is generally considered paramount, at least during the first three months. Even so, says Professor Maurice Mahoney of Yale's medical school, every embryo deserves a certain respect. "I see it as an individual human being," he says, "not with the same claims and rights as a newborn baby, but at least as an individual who calls upon me for some kind of protectiveness."
No case encapsulates all the ambiguities more dramatically than that of the late Mario and Elsa Rios, a Los Angeles couple whose orphaned embryos now lie in a freezer in Melbourne, Australia. Doctors there had removed several of Mrs. Rios' eggs in 1981, then fertilized them with sperm from an anonymous donor. Some were implanted in Mrs. Rios, and the remaining two were frozen. "You must keep them for me," she said. The implant failed, and the couple later died in a plane crash in Chile. Australian laws grant no "rights" to the two frozen embryos, but though local officials are believed to have the authority to destroy them, they have refrained from doing so. A state committee of inquiry is supposed to issue a report on the whole subject of reproductive technology this week.
The creation of extra embryos raises a number of delicate problems. Aside from the question of whether they have a "right" to be implanted (most experts deny it), doctors say they are needed for research. Some even favor creating embryos deliberately for the sake of research. But what exactly is "research"? Ideally, it is some experimental treatment that will help the embryo itself. Some states—Minnesota, for; example—prescribe that any experimentation must be known to be harmless. A number of authorities also believe that experimentation should be limited to the first 14 days after fertilization. There are scientists, however, who chafe at such restrictions on their research.
Beyond the argument about experimentation lies an even more touchy controversy: eugenics, the idea that the species can be improved through selective breeding. Now that it is possible to create human embryos by a process of selection among donor eggs and sperm, is it desirable to leave that selection entirely to chance? In one sense, doctors are already applying eugenics when they screen donors for genetic defects, a standard practice that many feel should become a lot more standard. In another sense, they are engaging in eugenics when they select medical students as sperm donors, a procedure that one survey showed to be happening in 62% of artificial inseminations. Says George J. Annas, professor of health law at Boston University: "Physicians in all of these situations are . . . selecting what they consider 'superior' genes . . . They have chosen to reproduce themselves."