Yes, the woman's right to choose is the just solution

When it comes to the Natallie Evans case, I find myself wholly in favour of “the woman’s right to choose”. If the lady seeks to retrieve the six embryos that were put in storage after she was treated for ovarian cancer – why shouldn’t she? Why should the HFEA stop her? Why should she have to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg simply to try and give fully developed lives to the lives-in-embryo already in existence?

It is a quixotic case, in one sense, as it could be said to reconcile both pro-choice and pro-life advocates. The strictly pro-life position is that you are not supposed to go around creating “spare” embryos in the first place – this is a consumerist and utilitarian approach to human life issues.

However, having created embryonic life, such embryos should not, further, be wantonly destroyed. They are human lives, albeit very very tiny ones, so why shouldn’t their mother have the chance of bringing them to full term?

The embryos were created – and “harvested” – when Natallie Evans was in a relationship with her partner, one Howard Johnston. At that time, Mr Johnson and Ms Evans jointly agreed to bring these embryos into being.

Sadly, their relationship came to an end, and it rather mean-spiritedly – it seems to me – Mr Johnston then withdrew his permission for the embryos jointly created to be reimplanted in Ms Evans’ womb.

There is no guarantee, of course, that Natallie could successfully bring the embryos through a full-term pregnancy: but it is her only chance of getting pregnant at all. Her pleas to the High Court and the Court of Appeal have been turned down, and she has been refused permission to go to the House of Lords.

This seems to me to be tyrannical and oppressive to a woman’s choice – a positive choice, too, to bring her own children into the world. Her case has been rejected because of the 1990s regulations set by the HFEA which describes the man and the woman who bring such embryos into being as “genitors”, treating them equally.

And that seems to me to be an ill-conceived (no pun) idea, and a legal flaw, wholly at odds with natural law.

Men and women, in the act of bringing a child into the world, are not equals. A mother is infinitely more involved with this event than a man. In the course of nature, a man’s involvement may be a few minutes: while a woman’s is 40 weeks’ pregnancy, plus suckling, plus the years of close nurturing that follow.

That is why, according the natural law, the woman’s choice should take precedence over the man’s. If the woman chooses to bring the embryos to term, the man should not (it seems to me) be allowed to over-rule her. If he doesn’t want to be a father – then perhaps he shouldn’t have had sexual congress in the first place.

In traditional Christian doctrine the marriage contract was itself an automatic agreement to be open to bearing children. True, Ms Evans and Mr Johnston were not married: but there have been cases of married couples where the husband was permitted to overrule the wife’s wishes in the matter of fertility. This idea would be null and void according to traditional moral theology – for, by getting married, the man would be held to agree to the consequences of the “marriage act”.

Sexual congress, by the same token, is itself a kind of agreement to be open to fertility.

Mr Johnston, after all, was not forced to have sexual intercourse: he was not coerced to donate his sperm. He did so willingly and with the intention of being a father. He has simply changed his mind – but why should his choice take precedence over Ms Evans’?

It seems to me that Natallie Evans should be supported by both pro-choice and pro-life advocates because she is entitled to choose what to do with her own body: and as she is fighting – and has fought very valiantly – to give fully-formed life to the embryos already in existence, she is in effect a pro-life champion too.

She is, I would say, a Mother Courage in embryo herself, and qualifies on all grounds of natural law and justice to be allowed her chance of motherhood.

The Guardian: Comment is Free. 10 April 2007.