SORRY, YOUR TIME IS UP

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Now that it is under way, the liquidation will not take long. Last Thursday workers at fertility clinics across Britain started taking vials out of liquid-nitrogen storage vats and allowing them to thaw. In some cases, the tiny specks inside--each the size of a pinpoint and consisting of one to four cells--were dosed for good measure with rubbing alcohol or salt water. By sometime next week, it will all be over. About 3,300 fertilized human eggs and potentially viable embryos will have been destroyed.

Parental intervention can still save some of these barely visible blobs of protoplasm, and last week a few did get last-minute reprieves. But despite the best efforts of clinic officials, the majority of these "parents"--couples who had donated egg and sperm in an attempt at in-vitro fertilization (IVF)--cannot or will not be located. Without word from the parents within five years, British law requires that the embryos be destroyed. And so, after last-ditch appeals to the courts and Prime Minister John Major failed, the clinics began dumping the eggs and embryos like so much abandoned property.

The world did not let them go quietly. The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, denounced the destruction as a "prenatal massacre"; protesters held a vigil outside Westminster Cathedral before the event and memorial services afterward; and people across Europe offered to "adopt" the frozen cells to preserve them. Childless couples bitterly lamented that they would gladly have taken the embryos for themselves. And some clinic workers contemplated going to jail rather than carry out the law, though they yielded in the end.

In one sense, the furor was an artificial one. Embryos of this sort are routinely destroyed in small batches every week, as they have been since the 1980s. The term embryo, moreover, carries an emotional charge that may be misleading. These entities consist of a handful of cells, the very earliest stages of the nine-month process that turns a fertilized egg into a full-term baby. They were frozen only a few days at most after conception; they would not even merit the designation fetus until after three months in the womb. "You can't regard these as little people," says Robert Forman, clinical director of the London Gynecology and Fertility Center. "They are living cells. They are not humans."

But the unprecedented scale of the event, and the fact that it was carried out by government order, focused public attention on a thorny ethical issue at the heart of IVF. Because the procedure is so hit-or-miss, clinics routinely create backup embryos. But what do they do with the leftovers?

That choice is almost always left to the parents. They can donate them for research; they can have them destroyed; they can keep the cells frozen for later use or give them anonymously to another couple. Right-to-life groups do not like the first two of these options; but even they recognize that it is difficult to galvanize public opinion against them.

Sometimes parents disappear, however, without leaving clear instructions or money to pay for storage. Clinic workers do their best to find the missing moms and dads, sometimes even enlisting police databases to try to track them down. When that is not possible, the clinics find themselves in an ethical quandary. They have no legal right to donate the embryos to childless couples or to release them for research. Yet without express parental interest, there is no legitimate reason to keep them on ice indefinitely. The embryos are thus left in a bizarre limbo hovering between life and death.

Some countries ignore the problem. The U.S., for example, has no national policy on abandoned embryos; clinics are generally responsible for setting their own guidelines. Germany's approach is to avoid the problem entirely by prohibiting freezing in the first place. France has a forced-destruction law, but it hasn't been implemented. In Britain, however, the law is clear: after five years, unclaimed embryos are thawed and disposed of. And last week, five years to the day after enactment, it was enforced for the first time.

The real question is not whether such a law is appropriate. Ethicists and health officials agree that the embryos cannot stay frozen forever. Even Basil Cardinal Hume, the ranking Catholic prelate in England and Wales, split last week with the Vatican's official outrage and acknowledged that the law is the only way out of an "appalling dilemma."

What really troubles most people is the law's rigidity. Says London Gynecology and Fertility Center director Ian Craft: "We would have to get rid of them eventually. But there could have been a moratorium for those we couldn't contact." Indeed, a set of missing parents could turn up anytime. And since the time limit is wholly arbitrary (the embryos don't go bad), it is hard to believe the matter could not have been handled with a little more delicacy.

--Reported by Helen Gibson/London and Ainissa Ramirez/Washington with other bureaus

With reporting by HELEN GIBSON/LONDON AND AINISSA RAMIREZ/ WASHINGTON WITH OTHER BUREAUS