Il dilemma dell’embrione

In un lungo reportage su Mother Jones («Souls On Ice», luglio-agosto 2006), Liza Mundy espone i dilemmi delle persone chiamate a decidere cosa fare dei propri embrioni congelati, avanzati al termine delle procedure di procreazione assistita: impiantarli per avere altri figli, donarli alla scienza o ad altre coppie, lasciarli nel congelatore o scongelarli per lasciarli estinguere.
Un ricercatore, Robert Nachtigall della University of California - San Francisco, ha dedicato uno studio ai problemi psicologici e morali che si affrontano in casi come questi, e la Mundy ne espone alcuni dei risultati:

“Until recently, I don’t know if any of us were aware of the scope of the embryo dilemma,” Nachtigall told colleagues at the 2005 annual meeting held by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (asrm), the trade group for fertility doctors. Struck by these unprompted revelations, he and fellow researchers decided to do a new study, this one looking explicitly at the way patients think about their unused, iced-down embryos. The study was published in 2005 in the journal Fertility and Sterility. Strikingly, Nachtigall found that even in one of the bluest regions of the country, which is to say, among people living in and around San Francisco, few were able to view a three-day-old laboratory embryo with anything like detachment. “Parents variously conceptualized frozen embryos as biological tissue, living entities, ‘virtual’ children having interests that must be considered and protected, siblings of their living children, genetic or psychological ‘insurance policies,’ and symbolic reminders of their past infertility,” his report noted. Many seemed afflicted by a kind of Chinatown syndrome, thinking of them simultaneously as: Children! Tissue! Children! Tissue! …
Many were troubled, Nachtigall said, by the notion of donating embryos to research or to another couple, and thereby losing control over their fate and well-being; they seemed to feel a parental obligation to protect their embryos. “I couldn’t give my children to someone else to raise, and I couldn’t give these embryos to someone else to bear,” said one woman. Another woman described her embryos as a psychic insurance policy, providing “intangible solace” against the fundamental parental terror that an existing child might die. “What if [my daughter] got leukemia?” said yet another, who considered her frozen embryos a potential source of treatment. A patient put the same notion more bluntly: “You have the idea that in a warehouse somewhere there’s a replacement part should yours get lost, or there is something wrong with them.”

È evidente, in alcuni di questi casi, l’influsso – sia pure quasi sempre assai parziale – della propaganda fondamentalista a favore dello statuto personale dell’embrione; ma l’attaccamento al prodotto del concepimento, che così tanti provano, si spiega solo in parte con il martellamento incessante dei fanatici. Conta di più, credo, un sentimento quasi di possesso per qualcosa che, in fondo, ci appartiene più intimamente di ogni altra nostra proprietà; un sentimento simile a quello che molti provano per i propri figli – e che non parte dal presupposto che siano persone, anzi spesso confligge col loro essere persone. Per questo sentimento è giusto avere rispetto, anche quando non lo si condivide, e tenerne conto nel formulare le norme che regolano il campo della procreazione assistita.