After Arizona cancer survivor Ruby Torres divorced her husband, her ability to have children on her own depended on seven frozen embryos she had created with her ex-husband. Unwilling to financially support a child resulting from one of the embryos, Ruby’s ex-husband opposed her decision to conceive and a family court judge ordered that the embryos be donated to another couple based on a medical agreement that had been signed when Ruby first underwent in vitro fertilization.
New Arizona legislation, SB 1393, could present a solution to the type of challenges that were faced by Ruby and her ex-husband. The bill would remove all financial and parental responsibility from a spouse that does not want a frozen embryo, and would require clinics to store such frozen embryos for 99 years. While this bill may help women like Ruby use their frozen embryos to have a child, it also raises a number of ethical concerns. Mostly, it could create personal crises-of-conscience for those spouses who do not want a child bearing their DNA to be born with an ex-spouse. Critics of the bill are calling it a “back-door attempt” to create constitutional rights of personhood for “fertilized eggs, zygotes, embryos, and fetuses.”
Hofstra Bioethics 