Tuesday August 14 12:24 PM ET
By Carl Winter
TRENTON, N.J. (Reuters) - The New Jersey Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously granted a divorced woman permission to dispose of seven frozen embryos left over from her failed marriage, despite the objections of her ex-husband.
In the fourth state court decision in a growing area of controversy for divorced U.S. couples, seven New Jersey high court justices upheld two lower court decisions by rejecting the claims of an agreement the man and woman made while still married that would have preserved the embryos for other childless couples.
The ruling allows for the embryos to be destroyed or donated to research.
A lawyer for the woman, identified only as J.B., argued before the state court in February that his client did not wish to become a biological parent against her will. Her case referred to the frozen embryos as pre-embryos.
The ex-husband, identified as M.B. and described by his attorney as a devout Roman Catholic, wanted the embryos to be either donated or possibly implanted in a future spouse.
The couple, from Camden County near Philadelphia, were married in 1992 and began in-vitro fertilization procedures that produced 11 embryos. Four embryos were implanted without result. But soon afterward, the woman became pregnant by natural means.
The couple separated in September 1996, six months after the birth of their daughter. The woman then filed a legal petition for permission to destroy the remaining embryos and won at the trial level in 1998. The state Appellate Division later upheld the decision.
``Because M.B. is a father and is capable of having other children, his right to procreate is not lost if he is denied the opportunity to use or donate the pre-embryos; whereas if the pre-embryos are successfully implanted, J.B. will be forced to become a biological parent. On balance, the fundamental right of J.B. not to procreate outweighs M.B.'s right to procreate,'' the high court ruled.
The New Jersey ruling strikes at the heart of an ongoing national debate over whether embryos produced by the process of in-vitro fertilization should be considered property or a form of human life.
Last week, President Bush (news - web sites) refused to allow frozen embryos produced by fertility treatments to be used in federally funded stem-cell research.
Tuesday's ruling followed similar decisions handed down over the past nine years by courts in New York, Massachusetts and Tennessee, which have all ruled that embryos cannot be used for reproductive purposes without the consent of both parents.
� 1997
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