Biological Clocks Tick Away With Ban On In- Vitro Fertilization
By Steven Dudley, Miami Herald

The legal and reproductive systems are not on the same clock in Costa Rica, the world's only nation that bans in vitro fertilization.

In the five years since 10 Costa Rican couples filed a complaint with the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), alleging their government was violating their right to have a family, six of the couples have passed their childbearing years and others are watching their chances tick away.

''I'm turning 40 in March,'' said Ana Cristina Castillo, one of the petitioners. ``In this case, you say you're 40 years old and it's like a death sentence. It's like you're overcooked.''

Castillo and the others hope the IACHR and the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court on Human Rights, both parts of the Organization of American States, will eventually rule in their favor. Such decisions carry only weak official weight, but can sometimes pressure national governments to change laws.

Costa Rica's Constitutional Court banned IVF in March 2000, on grounds that the procedure amounted to an abortion, after a local lawyer sued the government to block a 1996 presidential decree that attempted to regulate the practice in a country where more than 80 percent of the 4 million population considers itself Catholic.

''Banning IVF and denying women this basic right to have children is bringing us to a very subtle totalitarian state in which the government comes into your family's home and tells you when you can and when you cannot have children,'' said Luisa Cabal, international program director for the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-choice organization that has filed a brief supporting the Costa Rican couples' petition to the IACHR.

As with other issues regarding human conception, the difference between critics and supporters of IVF lies with the question of where life begins.


Fertilized Eggs
For the church, it's when the egg is fertilized by the sperm, a process that occurs in the laboratory during in vitro, which is Latin for ''in glass.'' Since IVF involves injecting several fertilized eggs into the female, most of which will not grow into babies, the practice amounts to an abortion of the nonviable eggs, the church argues.

''These techniques,'' the nation's bishops say in a guidebook on sex, ''are associated with a massive death of embryos.'' They add that in vitro fertilization amounts to ``sending your children to an avoidable war knowing that only 5 percent will return.''

Many pro-life groups in the United States hailed the Costa Rican court's decision as groundbreaking. And the Vatican, following the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1980s, decreed in vitro fertilization to be immoral.

Those who support IVF say that under normal circumstances, most fertilized eggs -- 89 of 100, they claim -- never make it to the uterus as embryos anyway. They argue that human life begins after a 15-day gestation period during which defects may appear and the egg may perish on its own.

''The [critics of in vitro] say, If you inject four [eggs] and one was born, then you killed three. But this is absolutely anti-biological,'' said Dr. Gerardo Escalante, the director of the Costa Rican Institute for Infertility, the only clinic in Costa Rica that offered the procedure before the court's decision.

But even within the debate, there are degrees of belief. Ana Victoria Sánchez, who is one of the petitioners to the IACHR, considers herself a devout Catholic and attends church regularly with her husband of 12 years. The 38-year-old was married in the church, often seeking spiritual guidance from her priest.


Too Late
But when she and her husband had problems conceiving a child, Sánchez turned to Escalante's institute. She was just about to start IVF treatment when the constitutional court made its decision.

''We don't have to take the Bible literally,'' Sánchez told The Miami Herald. ``Just because the Bible says it, I don't have to believe it.''

Sánchez says her conscience is clean with regard to her decision to seek IVF; she and her husband have since adopted two young brothers, choosing not to follow other Costa Ricans who go abroad for IVF procedures.

''Only God can judge me,'' she said.

Even within the church hierarchy there is dissent about IVF. Father Eladio Solano, the president of the church's Family Planning Commission, says he's the godfather to a Costa Rican child born of IVF performed in Mexico.

''I understand the church's position,'' he told The Miami Herald. ``But each case is different. And I have to put mercy into practice.''

Yet few of the couples that can still bear children harbor the hope that anything will change in Costa Rica before their time has passed as well.

''I'm angry,'' Sánchez said. ``How come those who are sick get treatment while they stop us from creating life?''