Letter to the Editor:  RE:  Roe – Wade Ramifications

With 13 states (Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming) with trigger laws, and the Supreme Court overturning Roe, embryos are constitutionally protected human beings.

It seems that someone who really believed embryos were people would object to them being frozen and “stored” indefinitely, such as in invitro fertilization clinics.

Embryos are, according to the legislators who voted for the trigger law, “unborn human beings,” with their own rights.

Here are some questions for those celebrating overturning Roe and putting trigger laws in place:

• If freezer equipment or electrical outages at invitro fertilization clinics malfunctions, does that lead to wrongful death suits?
• If people paying for embryo storage quit paying rent and abandon their embryos, is this neglect, abuse, or abandonment?
• Are abandoned embryos wards of the state or county which they reside, or are they discarded by the clinic?
• Will you arrest any person who discards an unwanted/unneeded embryo? Is that a felony?
• Will you arrest any person who freezes an embryo, thus preventing that person from achieving their potential?
• Couples donate their embryos. Is it legal to donate a person?
• Will in-vitro fertilization become outlawed, based on the personhood of the embryo?
• Whether you are an embryo in a woman’s womb, or an embryo in a clinic setting, will you be treated equally under the law?

Assisted reproduction is now a multibillion-dollar industry, with more than 440 U.S. clinics.  Currently there are 400,000 to a million embryos (persons with rights) stored in the US which is a large discrepancy. Oversight and regulations by U.S. lawmakers have been nearly non-existent with invitro fertilization, so we aren’t sure.

Concerning the rights of embryos, it is interesting to watch the hypocrisy unfold.

Kris Stokke
South 10th Street
Lamar, CO