A judge in Great Britain ruled earlier this month that two women who wanted to use frozen embryos created with their former partners did not have a right to use the embryos.

Natalie Evans, 31, and Lorraine Hadley, 38, had created the frozen embryos for later use in in vitro fertilization. Before that happened, though, their relationship with their respective partners ended. The men wanted the embryos destroyed, whereas the women wanted to be implanted with the embryos.

Great Britain’s 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act says that frozen embryos can only be used if both parties agree to said use.

A High Court Justice upheld that law saying that the Fertilization and Embryology Act “must be respected.”

In criticizing the ruling, some commentators couldn’t resist good old fashioned sexism. Writing in the London Evening Standard, for example, AC Grayling maintained that the rights of the potential father under the act should be shoved aside because “the clincher is the fact that parenthood is a more crucial matter to women” and decried the fact that requiring consent from both potential parents “places control of their [the women] prospects of motherhood into the least sympathetic hands: those of their ex-partners.”

Sources:

What they said about . . . the embryo ruling. William Cederwell, The Guardian, October 3, 2003.

IVF women lose their chance to have babies. Sarah Womack, Daily Telegraph, October 2, 2003.

The British Court Rejects Women’s Appeal to Use Frozen Embryos by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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