"At a time when anti-choice groups are sincerely attempting to redefine personhood as "the beginning of biological development" -- raising the possibility of everything from miscarriages being investigated as potential homicides to pregnant women qualifying for the carpool lane -- blurring the line between religious beliefs and observable facts is what I would call "risky" and "radical."

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I was all over this a year and a half ago. Link in my name. And I am now watching these various state-level offshoots of "PersonhoodUSA.com" initiatives (we now have one in Nevada).

My wife and I went through in vitro ten years ago and were asked ahead of time what we wanted to do with any extra embryos. We both said without hesitation that we would want to donate them to couples who needed them.

We came to find out later that only about 5% of couples make that choice. The rest aren't sure what they want to do, but they are absolutely certain that they do not want another couple raising their "children."

That's how we've ended up with hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos that are destined to stay in the freezer forever. People don't want more kids, but they don't want other people to have theirs.

It all turned out to be moot in our case, as no children were forthcoming, but I find it interesting that so few people want to donate embryos. To us, it seemed like a no-brainer.

Help the unfortunate. Isn't that what Jesus would want?

There are some 400,000 frozen embryos in storage in the United States, and about 8 million women give birth each year in the United States. The vast majority of the pregnancies occur without (and some even despite) medical intervention. How many of these women would seek to have a 'mystery' baby implanted rather than their own genetically related child? How many couples seeking invitro fertilization are doing so expressly so that they can conceive a child that is genetically related to them, rather than adopt? What about those frozen embryos that have genetic diseases? Should they also be implanted somewhere? If frozen embryos are to be accorded full rights, shouldn't disabled frozen embryos be granted the same rights?

Most of the frozen embryos will never be implanted in a womb. They contain human DNA, but they aren't babies and never will be.

So how about looking after real babies already born? How about enacting real healthcare reforms that would treat access to medical services as a right, and not a priviledge reserved for the rich? How about really investing in quality education for all children?

The pervasiveness of religious thought in public and private decisions is an ongoing indication that we live in a country that rejects science for understanding reality. The media clouds matters by polarizing our positions into oversimplifications: we're either religious or atheist, conservative or liberal.

The only embryos that I've been involved with are now grown adults, so I don't have much at stake here. If I had to make a decision about frozen embryos, I would be inclined to have them used for stem cell research. I would prefer not to have my genetic material wandering around later in the form of a person I would never know. Treating an embryo as a person is completely idiotic in my opinion. If you follow that line of reasoning, who's to say that we shouldn't preserve every sperm or egg cell produced because they’re half a person?

Basing decisions like this on the thoughts of someone who may or may not have existed two thousand years ago and whose scientific knowledge would be equally behind the times is absurdity at its highest.

Mary had an abortion?

Keep having babies until all of the embryos have been used up.

Of course, a true Christian would never have encountered such a moral dilemma. To create an embryo, someone needed to masterbate, which we all know is a sin. Unless of course the necessary semen was collected without masterbating, maybe through a little prostrate massage, in which case we are back to "keep having babies until they are all used up".

By the way, how come it's OK to rely on medical procedures that obviously involved the destruction of embryos during their development, but it's not OK to destroy embryos to develop medical procedures? You can't destroy embryos in an effort to discover new medical procedures but you can use medical procedures that destroyed embryos in their discovery. Now that's a moral dilemma. That's like a vegetarian who will eat meat as long as someone else killed it. And speaking of which, doesn't the Bible say, "thou shalt not kill"? It doesn't say, "Thou shalt not kill humans".

Because that was a concern of the people interviewed by the journalist. You know, interviews, conducted by journalists. Damn reporter clearly had an agenda- should have just asked smart friend Laura instead!

"to fulfill God's mandate to be fruitful and multiply"

The earth is full, so god's so called mandae is OVER!.

These people could be more Christ like if they chose not to have children and helped save the planet by adopting.

The U.S. does lacks ethical standards for invitro fertilization. We should not be letting doctors and couple inplant more than one embyo or fertilize so many embryos.

If some people are so against getting rid of extra embryos why are they creating them to begin with? Thye need to think about this beofore they get into their 'ego' embryo production.

Are there really that many people looking to "adopt" frozen embryos from other couples? Why don't they adopt children that have been born already and need homes. It's my understanding that many couples go through the whole frozen embryo process because they want THEIR DNA, not someone elses, so presumably they don't want another couples cast offs.

Considering that the article was a companion piece to one about an Interfaith Think Tank developing a guide for the Faithful on the ethics of embryo donation, what is so confusing? And for the record, the subtitle specifically mentions 'struggles with science,faith....'

To me, the most interesting line from one of the Think Tank members was

"Marcia Hermansen, an Islamic scholar at Loyola University, said Islam does not forbid stem cell research or the destruction of extra embryos because Muslims believe embryos do not have the status of a person."