My bad. You must mean, then, that this is your answer to my question: "For anyone who never reached that stage (embryo, anencephalic, profoundly retarded, etc.), I would delegate the decision to the parents."
Help me out here.
Are you suggesting that you would allow parents to legally sacrifice their own children? Children, as best I recall, are n ot legally capable of giving consent. Healthy children, for instance, cannot legally consent to surgery.
I think I understand you to say that you would allow the parents of embryos to sacrifice those healthy embryos to research.
And I think I understand you to say that you would likewise allow parents to give their consent to have children who have severe birth anomolies (including, perhaps, Downs Syndrome with profound retardation??) also be sacrificed on the altar of scientific research.
But what about healthy children? Should there be any restrictions, in your view, on the right of parents to give their consent to have those human beings sacrificed, if doing so might lead to a cure to Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease??
Embryos do not have the capacity for awareness or sensation, and are thus very different from late-stage fetuses or already born children. The difference may not matter to you, but it matters to a lot of us. It also matters to a creature which is experiencing pain. I certainly think parents are much better suited than the government to decide what to do with their excess embryos.
I would also be happy to let parents decide what to do with full-term anencephalic babies, some of whom have a partial brainstem and thus don't immediately qualify as clinically brain-dead, but who have no possibility of ever developing awareness or sensation, and will inevitably die shortly. If parents want to hasten the death of these unfortunate creatures, in order to maximize the number of lives that may saved with their organs, that should be their prerogative, as the infant in question will never be in a position to consent or not consent.
We have to be willing to make some value judgements. It's just a cop-out to insist on reducing all the tremendous complexities of life to black-and-white. The animal rights extremists do this cop-out. According to them, since animals cannot comprehend medical research and thus cannot consent to be used in it, we may never use an animal in research (much less for food), no matter how great the good that might come of it, nor how minimal the suffering might be for any particular research project. In my book, the embryo rights extremists are just as irrational and impractical as the animal rights extremists.