Watching law & Order on BBC America, I pondered an ethical/legal question brought up: frozen embryos were destroyed against the wishes of the clinic and “parents” by parties and motives not relevant here.
Since the embryos were not yet born, their destruction cannot be considered as murder, and, due to laws regarding organ donation, they cannot be bought, sold, or insured like property.
SO!
If embryos are not property nor people…
…WHAT ARE THEY?
Embryos.
Your question suggests a false dichotomy; that everything is either (a) a person or (b) a thing that can be owned. But why should this be so?
(In fact, it demonstrably isn’t so; wild animals are not people, and they are also not owned.)
(Please note that my response is not my personal opinion, nor do I claim it to be factual, nor do I claim anything else about it.) Based on your comparison to organ donation, maybe you feel that they have the same status as organs? What happens to an appendix or gallbladder that has been removed from a person - would you consider it property?
Once a non-viable organ is no longer attached/inside of you…It’s no longer yours.
Unlike a malfunctioning internal organ to be removed, the embryos were created ex-utero for the purpose of implantation…to bear a child.
When a man and wife divorced, “custody” of the embryos was awarded to the man, and his new wife wanted to be implanted with the embryos when he died.
BTW…If it is in season and I am licensed, I can do out into the woods, stalk, shoot, and eat a deer…a wild animal I don’t own.
I think we need to explore the concept of ownership. I think I would own that deer, just as much as I’d own a rock that I pick up and put in my pocket.
If you reduce a wild animal to captivity, then you own it (in most jurisdictions). Likewise if you hunt it, you may own the cadaver (again, depending on the jurisdiction and, of course, on any laws that control or regulate hunting).
But while it’s a living animal in the wild you don’t own it. You couldn’t sell it, for example, or make a gift of it to anyone. You don’t have any rights in it that look anything at all like ownership.
Similarly you don’t own the air above any land that you own. You may (or may not, depending on the laws of your jurisdiction) own the airspace, or you may have rights in the airspace that look like ownership, but not the air - the oxygen and the nitrogen. Nobody owns the high seas, or the water, etc, in them. Nobody (nowadays) can own a human being in most or all countries, and in many countries nobody owns a human corpse, or human tissue. Which brings us back to the embryos.
It’s entirely possible to have a legal regime in which nobody owns an embryo, and yet an embryo is not given the status of a human person. Why not? “Persons” and “things that cannot be reduced to ownership” do not have to be identical categories.
People have stored stem cells which they presumably own. People donate blood which they relinquish ownership of. People store blood for themselves (usually for medical procedures) which again they own.
Both things (blood, stem cells) have about the same viability as a frozen embryo. So ownership seems possible. The stem cells seem more analogous as the ownership is to the child, in care of the parents. Since we don’t own our children, but the child owns themself in care of parents, well it gets to be a hot mess for a frozen embryo.
As the status of embryos is not yet clear to us, we must be very careful in our actions with them.
By the way, did you see that a woman recently gave birth to a child whose embryo had been frozen for 27 years?
In my province, all wild animals are owned: they are the property of the Crown.
Property of the Crown, or of the one who wears the crown? Can a fancy hat own property?
The Crown is the general term for the monarch as head of state, separate from the monarch in her personal capacity. Crown property is the term for public property, held by the Crown on behalf of the public, hence “Crown lands”. Wildlife are declared by statute to be Crown property. Similarly, public prosecutors are referred to as “Crown prosecutors” or just “the Crown” in court: “The Crown’s position on sentence is as follows: etc.”
In the US, the term “the People” plays a similar metaphoric role in referring to the government.