Jonny Fan

The Case of a Wife Seeking the Destruction of Her Husband’s Embryos Conceived Outside Their Marriage

Recently, a case involving a woman, identified as Ms. Zhu, who has cancer and sought to have embryos conceived by her husband with another woman destroyed, has attracted considerable public attention in China.

Unlike previous disputes centered primarily on marital property or child custody, this case is distinctive because it has brought something that has largely remained within the domain of medicine—the embryos created through assisted reproductive technology—into public debate in a concrete and particularly sensitive way.

When Ms. Zhu initially requested that the embryos be destroyed, the hospital reportedly responded that it had no authority to do so and could only keep them in permanent storage. According to the latest media reports, however, the man involved in the case claimed that the embryos had subsequently been destroyed in the presence of a third-party lawyer.

When Ms. Zhu sought the destruction of her husband’s embryos conceived outside their marriage, those embryos clearly represented potential future children of her husband and another woman. Yet, in the subsequent process of destroying them, their status seemed to disappear silently, as though they were merely some kind of property.

So what, exactly, is the moral status of an embryo?

Is an embryo merely a form of medical material? Is it a potential human life? Or is it a form of human life that deserves special respect?

This question is not simply about a particular medical technology. It concerns something more fundamental: how modern society understands life itself.

The Question of the Beginning of Human Life in Medical Ethics

Social recognition of a new human being, and the establishment of social relationships with that person, begins at birth. This corresponds with our intuitive experience: before a child is born, we cannot interact with the child in the same direct and effective way that we can after birth.

Before the emergence of modern technologies such as ultrasound, people were also unable to directly observe fetal development. But this does not mean that people in ancient societies knew nothing about what happened before birth. They developed their own understandings of the moral significance of unborn life.

As early as ancient Greece, Hippocrates, often referred to as the “father of Western medicine,” articulated a series of influential principles of medical ethics. The traditional version of the Hippocratic Oath includes the statement:

“I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.”

This reflects a classical conception of medicine in which the physician was not merely a healer of disease, but also bore a responsibility to protect life.

Ancient Chinese physicians did not leave behind similarly explicit ethical formulations concerning abortion or the moral status of the fetus. Nevertheless, abortion was generally treated critically in traditional medical writings.

For example, Zhang Gao, a physician of the Southern Song dynasty, recorded in Yi Shuo (Medical Sayings), Volume 10, under the section “The Retribution for Causing Abortions,” the story of a woman who made her living by selling abortion-inducing medicines. Later, she developed an incurable illness. Before her death, she asked her family to burn all the prescriptions for abortion medicines she had accumulated and warned her children:

“I swear that this profession must never be passed on.”

Her son asked why, since this was precisely how she had made her fortune. She replied:

“Every night I dream of hundreds of little children sucking at my head… These are all the retribution I have brought upon myself by destroying pregnancies with poisonous medicines.”

Clearly, the medical ethics reflected in this account were also influenced by Buddhist thought.

In the modern era, the year 1948 marked another important development. In response to the devastating consequences of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan turning medical technology into an instrument of killing during World War II, the World Medical Association (WMA) formulated the famous Declaration of Geneva in an effort to rebuild the ethical foundations of the medical profession. The Chinese Medical Association also participated in the founding of the World Medical Association as China’s representative.

The first version of the Declaration of Geneva largely reproduced and continued the structure and spirit of the Hippocratic Oath. The principle mentioned above was given a more explicit modern formulation:

“I WILL MAINTAIN the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception.”

This meant that, within the international system of medical ethics in the early twentieth century, the conceptus and embryo were explicitly regarded as forms of life deserving the respect of the medical profession.

However, with the development and growing influence of abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, embryo research, and modern biomedicine, the medical profession gradually encountered new practical and ethical challenges: how should medicine respect human life while also responding to the demands of disease treatment, scientific research, and society?

As a result, the Declaration of Geneva underwent several revisions.

The 1968 version still retained the phrase “from the time of conception.” But the 1983 version changed it to:

“I WILL MAINTAIN the utmost respect for human life from its beginning.”

The 2005 version simplified the wording further:

“I WILL MAINTAIN the utmost respect for human life.”

This change does not mean that the medical profession had solved the question of when human life begins. On the contrary, it reflects a reality: different societies, cultures, and ethical traditions disagree about when human life begins. International medical ethics therefore chose to avoid providing a simple answer and instead leave room for interpretation.

At the same time, one important question remains:

If human life deserves respect, when should that respect begin?

The Ethical Dilemma of Frozen Embryos

The development of assisted reproductive technology has made this question increasingly concrete.

Because in vitro fertilization does not guarantee a successful pregnancy, medical practice commonly involves creating multiple embryos and selecting those considered suitable for transfer. This process inevitably results in large numbers of surplus frozen embryos.

In recent years, Chinese media have repeatedly reported on hospitals storing large numbers of frozen embryos that remain unclaimed.

Because IVF always involves an element of uncertainty, couples who wish to have a child often create multiple embryos to increase the chances of selecting one suitable for transfer. As a result, surplus embryos inevitably accumulate.

These embryos occupy a particularly complicated status.

If they are regarded entirely as objects, they are clearly different from ordinary medical materials because they possess the potential to develop into human beings.

If they are regarded entirely as persons who have already been born, however, they do not correspond to existing legal identities and social relationships.

For this reason, contemporary bioethics often uses an intermediate concept: special moral status.

An embryo is neither an ordinary object nor a person who has already been born. Rather, it is a form of living human existence that calls for special ethical treatment.

At present, the fate of millions of such embryos is, in the words of hospitals, essentially to “keep them in storage for the time being.”

The “14-Day Rule”

In the field of human embryo research, there is an important principle known as the “14-day rule.” Under this principle, human embryos cultured in vitro may not be maintained beyond 14 days after fertilization. Culturing them beyond this point has traditionally been regarded as an unacceptable violation of respect for human life.

The choice of 14 days is related to important developmental changes that occur around this stage.

At approximately day 14, the embryo begins to form the primitive streak, and the anterior-posterior axis of the developing human body begins to become established. At roughly the same time, the possibility of natural identical twinning essentially disappears. Some ethicists therefore argue that this marks the point at which the individuality of the embryo begins to become more clearly established.

The principle was first proposed in the United Kingdom and subsequently incorporated into law. Many countries around the world have since adopted similar restrictions.

In 2003, China also formally recognized the 14-day limit in its Ethical Guiding Principles for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research, which stipulated that blastocysts obtained through in vitro fertilization, somatic cell nuclear transfer, parthenogenesis, or genetic modification should not be cultured in vitro for more than 14 days from fertilization or nuclear transfer.

Yet the 14-day rule raises an important question:

Is there really a clear moral boundary between day 14 and day 15?

Biologically, embryonic development is a continuous process. Ethically, however, society needs rules that can actually be applied.

The 14-day rule is therefore better understood as an ethical and social consensus than as a scientific conclusion capable of proving that “life begins at this point.”

This principle is now facing new challenges. An increasing number of scientists have sought to extend the 14-day limit. Some have proposed extending it to 28 days because they want to observe more developmental processes and gain a deeper understanding of human development.

This also demonstrates an important point: many boundaries in bioethics are not determined by scientific facts alone. Rather, they emerge from a balance among scientific knowledge, social values, and ethical judgment.

Rethinking Our Understanding of Life Through the Embryo Question

It is worth noting that no country in the world currently applies the “14-day rule” used in embryo research to the regulation of abortion.

Some physicians observe a strict boundary at 14 days when conducting embryo research, while other physicians continue to perform abortions on fetuses that are far beyond 14 days of development.

This reveals a tension within modern bioethics: different areas of medicine apply different ethical standards to human life.

Is such a difference justified?

Some argue that embryo research and abortion involve fundamentally different ethical circumstances and therefore cannot simply be compared.

Others argue that if we acknowledge that embryos possess some form of moral value as human life, that value should be treated with greater consistency across different fields.

Whatever position one takes, these debates demonstrate that the embryo question is not merely a medical issue. At its deepest level, it concerns how a society understands the value of human beings.

The Bioethics Class We Never Had

For a long time, Chinese society has had a distinctive historical context surrounding abortion.

During the era of the one-child policy, abortion was for many years used as one of the instruments of population policy. As a result, there was very limited public discussion of the ethical questions surrounding abortion.

At the same time, advertisements for abortion once filled streets and alleys across China. These advertisements often portrayed abortion simply as an easy, low-risk form of medical consumption. To a significant extent, they helped shape society’s understanding of human life.

According to data published in China’s National Health Statistics Yearbook, the number of abortions in China in recent years has been around 9–10 million annually, which in some years has exceeded the number of births.

As China enters a new stage of its demographic development, and as the country increasingly emphasizes the creation of a “fertility-friendly society,” it may be time to make up for a missing lesson in bioethics.

Discussing the moral value of embryos is not important merely because embryos are objects of medical practice. It is important because the way we treat embryos reflects how a society understands the fundamental value of human beings.

And that understanding ultimately becomes the anchor for how we treat one another.

When life itself is respected, human beings can be respected.

References

World Medical Association. Declaration of Geneva. World Medical Association.

原祎鸣. 每年，有百万个冷冻胚胎“沉睡”在医院[EB/OL]. 界面新闻, 2021-05-01. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/BXySQARGZe7TzDZxrTyOIQ.

翟立昕, 王国豫. 围绕胚胎研究“体外培养14天规则”的伦理争议[J]. 生命科学, 2025, 37(11): 1392-1399. DOI:10.13376/j.cbls/2025136.