Milonov took on Russian embryos: “These are not Brussels sprouts”

A State Duma deputy has prepared a bill that would stop egg freezing at the state level.

State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov has prepared a bill on embryos. The bill proposes to prohibit the cryopreservation and destruction of human embryos when using assisted reproductive technologies (ART), introducing changes to the fifth article 55 of the federal law “On the fundamentals of protecting the health of citizens of the Russian Federation”, and also to exclude the inclusion of a human embryo as reproductive tissues and human organs by amending article 2 Federal Law “On Transplantation of Human Organs and (or) Tissues”.

Vitaly Milonov proposed to state one of the wordings of Law 55 as follows: “Citizens have the right to cryopreservation and storage of their germ cells, tissues of reproductive organs at the expense of personal funds and other means provided for by the legislation of the Russian Federation. Cryopreservation and destruction of human embryos is not permitted.” The parliamentarian proposed replacing the term “embryos” with “embryos that have not been cryopreserved.”

“What we call embryos is already a living person, this is the beginning of life,” Vitaly Milonov, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Family Protection, Paternity, Maternity and Childhood, explained to MK the essence of his bill. – Cryopreservation involves freezing living organisms of a fertilized egg that develops into a full-fledged human being.

Modern methods involve freezing a living organism and killing those embryos that are not suitable and become “superfluous”. These are technologies for completely unsparing obstetric care, when fertilized eggs are frozen. We don’t know the real consequences after a person is frozen and thawed – these are not Brussels sprouts. There are no studies that say how this will affect subsequent generations. It is simply impossible to obtain them yet – freezing a person is still prohibited in our country. The same is due to the fact that some embryos are killed during obstetric procedures. In fact, their start to life is being managed worse than during an abortion. Cells of living organisms are used as waste.

“The bill was developed in order to protect the morality and security of the state, traditional Russian spiritual and moral values. An embryo is a human embryo at a developmental stage of up to eight weeks. A human embryo cannot be considered either as reproductive tissue subject to cryopreservation or arbitrary disposal, much less as an object of civil circulation and property law.

The Orthodox Church regards the receipt of an excess number of embryos and manipulation of them (elimination, reduction, freezing) as a form of murder, causing irreparable harm to the moral and physical health of the nation. Any manipulation of embryos that intentionally leads to their death is murder. The process of freezing excess embryos can be defined as murder, since the likelihood of having a child after freezing the embryos is reduced by three times.

A number of acts of international law (unfortunately, not in the Russian legal system) enshrine the idea that an embryo is a person from the moment of conception. The embryo is recognized as a subject of law in the legal systems of Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, Madagascar, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, El Salvador, Peru, and a number of US states. In 2016, for the first time in the former USSR, such protection was introduced in the Republic of Abkhazia. A striking example of a balanced approach to the legal personality of an embryo is German legislation, which applies the principle: human life begins from the moment of fertilization,” says the explanatory note to the bill.

According to the author of the bill, his initiative will not require additional expenditures from the federal budget.