the Awesome Highlighter

6] from Machon Puah

The Octomom and the Halacha

A couple of months ago the world was amazed at the news that a woman gave birth to eight children at once, all of whom appear to be healthy. The media dubbed her "Octomom" and she became an overnight celebrity. As the details of the case became known, the amazement turned to shock and these shockwaves were felt strongest in the fertility community of doctors, specialists and ethicists.

I do not know all of the details but it appears that this woman underwent a fertility treatment in which a large number of embryos were implanted. This is contrary to the guidelines set down by all fertility organizations worldwide and are even legally binding in certain countries.

In the past, the feeling was that the more embryos that are placed in the uterus during an IVF cycle the greater the chance of achieving a pregnancy. So once they used to put back seven or eight embryos. However, it did not improve pregnancy rates and modern practice is to put back one or two embryos and only on very rare occasions more. So really this case should never have happened, but it does raise important questions regarding such high risk pregnancies.

The uterus is a fascinating organ that can expand to carry a pregnancy and then contract back to normal size quite soon after birth, but even the uterus has limits and cannot usually carry so many fetuses at once. In addition, the greater the number of babies, the less each gets from the source of nutrients - i.e. from the mother through the placenta, and so, while Octomom was able to carry these eight children to an almost fullterm and healthy birth, this is a rarity. It is much more common in such cases to lose all of the babies.

The suggested treatment for multifetal pregnancies is reduction of some of the embryos to a number that the uterus can safely carry. This solution is questionable as it touches the weighty issue of abortions. Which is related to another issue; what is the halachic status of the unborn fetus?

The Gemara (Yevamot 69b) states that the embryo is considered as like water before forty days. Of course, the embryo is not water - rather it is cytoplasm, but the idea is that the embryo is not yet life but is simply fluid. This implies that life starts after 40 days and that before this the embryo is not considered alive. The embryo is considered alive only after 40 days.

However, in another source the Gemara (Sanhedrin 57b) includes abortion in the prohibition of a gentile committing murder, based on the verse "whoever spills the blood of a man within a man his blood will be spilt." Here the Gemara does not stipulate before or after 40 days and this teaches us that the law is more strict for a non-Jew than for a Jew in this area.

But if the non-Jew is held responsible for killing a day-old embryo, then this suggests that such a being is alive, even though a Jew is not held culpable for killing him.

A third source (Nida 8b) suggests that the end of the first trimester is when the pregnancy is called a pregnancy and thus this may be the beginning of life.

So what is the halachic status of the embryo?

More on this next week.

   remove