Ethical viewpoints on cryopreservation of human embryos

: In the introduction the author describes how moral judgements are being formed in the pluralistic structures of today's societies. Moral relativism and subjectivism are the wide spread consequences of empirical anthropological theories. In this situation the necessity of an objective and normative moral theory (Christian natural law theory) is being stressed. Neither biology nor medicine can pronounce final judgements on the value of human life. The arguments in favour of cryoconservation (medical progress, parents wish to have children, cost-reduction) are outweighed by those arguments which maintain that man cannot dispose of human life through the manipulation of the progenitive act outside marriage and of the juman act of procreation. There are also the risks and the endangering of the human value of the embryo, up to prolicide which is considered to be permissible in some cases, on these moral grounds the author objects to the cryoconservation of embryos as does the relevant instruction of the papal magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church (Donum vitae 1987). He does not, however, take a final stance on how the subjective decision of the physician is to be judged in the individual case.