The Feb. 26 front-page article “Patients with cancer fear Ala. ruling may stop IVF” was very personal to me. My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer at 42, when she was considering trying to have a child by in vitro fertilization. Aware there was a good chance chemotherapy could accelerate menopause, she approached Harvard University’s IVF clinic about harvesting eggs. An internal ethics debate ensued because of her cancer, but one doctor agreed because I had agreed to raise her child or children in the event of her death. She knew the hormones in IVF treatment posed a danger for her, but she went ahead, followed by six months of chemotherapy.
She died three years later, but those fertilized eggs sustained her joy in life through the treatments she endured and her hope for the future. The Alabama court would have denied her that.
Darcy Bacon, Washington
The Feb. 27 news analysis, “Alabama IVF ruling exposes GOP’s remorse over ‘person’” highlighted the conflict between “personhood” of embryos and support for in vitro fertilization. The article reported on Republicans, including members of Congress, who favor continued availability of IVF, even though not all embryos produced through IVF result in pregnancy.
I was the program director for reproductive medicine at the National Institutes of Health from 1987 to 2000. Every funding initiative I wrote that could involve research on IVF was required to contain restrictive language from the 1977 Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects. This language barred any federal funds from being used for IVF research without approval by an ethics advisory board. No such board existed. The result was that research on IVF was carried out without federal oversight or “around the edges,” using less sophisticated technology, such as intrauterine insemination. The 1996 Dickey-Wicker amendment explicitly barred federal funding for creating or destroying a human embryo.
If members of Congress truly want to support IVF and research on improving its practice and outcome, they should lift these restrictions.
Donna L. Vogel, Bethesda
So, Alabama has settled the question of which came first: the chicken or the egg.
The chicken IS the egg!
Thomas McBirney, Columbia
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter advocating that this was the time to build on that foundation and extend it to the rights of the unconceived. Noting the biblical injunction “Thou shalt not spill thy seed upon the ground,” this would have applied to anything that prevented the union of sperm and egg or resulted in their destruction before conception, including all means of birth control, as well as female menstruation and male masturbation.
In view of the movement among Republican governors, legislators and judges to extend the “right to life” to embryos created via in vitro fertilization and hinting at bans on contraceptives, that letter doesn’t seem to me to be so far-fetched anymore.
Larry Powers, Springfield
