Tag: embryos

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Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk

The ‘expendable children’

Couples who struggle to get pregnant are turning with greater frequency to the in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry for assistance.

In some cases, they can end up feeling they are “too pregnant” when twins, triplets, or quads arise. This occurs from the practice of implanting more than one embryo at a time to improve pregnancy success rates.

‘Selective reduction’

A multiplet pregnancy can involve significant risk, both for the children in utero, and for the mother. Because of these risks, the pregnant mother will sometimes be advised to opt for a “selective reduction,” where potassium chloride is injected into one or two of the growing babies, to cause their hearts to seize, followed by death and the gradual re-absorption of their bodies during the remainder of the pregnancy.

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Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk

What should be done with orphans stranded in liquid nitrogen?

Some humanitarian tragedies occur quietly and “in the background,” only gradually coming to light years or decades after serious harm has already occurred, like nerve damage in infants exposed to lead paint or cancers in patients who were exposed to asbestos.

More recently, the humanitarian tragedy of hundreds of thousands of embryonic human beings frozen and abandoned in fertility clinics has come to light — “orphans in ice” arising from the decades-long practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Dangers of human stockpiling

A recent news report chronicled a Chinese woman named Huang Yijun. Sixty years ago, her unborn child died, but the pregnancy was never expelled from her body. Instead, her baby’s body slowly began to calcify inside her, becoming a crystallized, stone-like mass.

Such stone babies (known as lithopedions) are extremely rare. When Mrs. Huang was 92 years old, the baby was discovered in her abdomen and surgically removed.

This rare medical event prompts us to consider a thought experiment. Imagine a drug that could be injected into a child to crystallize him, but without killing him. The process would turn the child into a static mass for as many years as the parents wanted; another injection would reverse the process, and allow the child to wake up and continue growing.

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

The courage to refuse to cooperate in evil

Making Sense out of Bioethics column by Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

An electrician by trade, Tim Roach is married with two children and lives about an hour outside Minneapolis. He was laid off his job in July 2009.

After looking for work for more than a year and a half, he got a call from his local union in February 2011 with the news anyone who is unemployed longs for, not just a job offer, but one with responsibility and a good salary of almost $70,000 a year.

He ultimately turned the offer down, however, because he discovered that he was being asked to oversee the electrical work at a new Planned Parenthood facility under construction in St. Paul on University Ave. Aware that abortions would be performed there, he knew his work would involve him in “cooperation with evil,” and he courageously declined the offer.

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Humans in ‘frozen orphanages’ need protection

A key argument in the embryonic stem cell debate — widely invoked by scientists, patient advocacy groups, and politicians — involves the fate of frozen embryos.

Barack Obama put it this way in 2008: “If we are going to discard those embryos, and we know there is potential research that could lead to curing debilitating diseases — Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease — if that possibility presents itself, then I think that we should, in a careful way, go ahead and pursue that research.”

The head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, embraced this same line of reasoning by

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