There is nothing crueler about that attitude than there is about choosing to wear a condom rather than have a baby every nine months; or choosing not to have sex at all.

All those unborn children who will never exist thanks to my decision not to have as many children as physically possible. Oh! The cruelty!

every sperm is sacred?

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

With credit to Monty Python.

I don't think the frozen embryos are even embryos, but are zygotes. We are talking about something that not only does not have sentience, but doesn't even have nerves. There isn't any mechanism to feel pain, let alone register it. I don't even think the small grouping of cells can even respond to environment. They can't move away from discomfort, nor move toward comfort. They don't yet have a way to consume nourishment. To have a debate about morals and suggest in anyway these blobs of cells have any claim to moral worth is divorced from any reality.

The old test about real-world moral value was to suggest a burning building with 500 embryos in one room and a child in another. You have time to save one, which does one save? Obviously, one saves the child, not the embryos. In this case, with zygotes, I'd save a cat (and I am a dog person) rather than 1,000 zygotes or embryos.

There isn't a moral issue here. Those frozen cells aren't humans, aren't close to human. I may potentially be President of the United States, but I don't see people playing Hail to the Chief when I walk into a room. Potential must be measured against some reality of actual occurrence. Until the zygotes are implanted into a womb, they don't have any real potential for human existence.

They should simply be defrosted and disposed of at the owners direction.

I think it is indisputable that the chickens, pigs and cows that we eat have more intelligence, sentience etc. than a fetus, embryo or zygote. Abortion foes would have an argument on a humanitarian basis except they pretty much all support war and the death penalty.

I may potentially be President of the United States, but I don't see people playing Hail to the Chief when I walk into a room.

lol, MacAdvisor.

Bsharp,

Maybe fundamentalists are pro-life because they want all the fetuses to be born and grow into little soldiers, then?

Good points Mac, but surely the fact that so few donate their left over embryos and their reasons for not doing so, suggests that for those parents at least, the embryo is more than a mere assembly of cells?