EMBRYOTOMY. – Fetal mutilation performed to accomplish delivery when obstructed by a disproportion between the diameters of the pelvis and the fetus or by an abnormal presentation of the latter (shoulder presentation).
It consists in perforating, with special instruments, the head or the body of the fetus still in the uterus, emptying its contents (evisceration), reducing its volume by crushing with suitable forceps, and, thus macerated, extracting it from the maternal womb. Depending on the circumstances, this may lead to craniotomy, cephalotripsy, decapitation, basiotripsy, and basioclasis (crushing of the base of the skull), rachiotomy, or dismemberment.
Embryotomy may be performed on a dead fetus or on a living fetus. The former, for which there are no moral objections, presents multiple and legitimate indications, sparing the mother suffering and serious danger at the cost of only the sentimental sacrifice of the integrity of the dead fetus’s body. Embryotomy on a living fetus, on the other hand, remains a painful humiliation and a moral stain upon obstetrics; consequently, it is increasingly falling into disuse, supplanted by advances in obstetric and surgical techniques such as symphysiotomy, pubiotomy, cesarean section, and a more reasonable application of premature delivery at a time when the fetus, though no longer in the abortive period, has not yet reached the diameters and volume of full development, as well as version maneuvers aimed at correcting the presentation.
Even when employing such methods, however, circumstances of time, place, or the progression of labor may render the above operations impossible, which are capable of saving both mother and fetus.
to an embryotomy or similar operation; yet it is always well to strive in the best way possible to safeguard the life of both mother and fetus. All the more so since civil legislation on this matter, partly contrary to Catholic morality, removes responsibility in such cases, justifying them, as in Italian law, by the state of necessity (Penal Code, art. 54). But even in Italian law, the removal of responsibility does not extend to making the medical intervention a legal obligation or an official duty (cf. V. PALMIRA, *Medicina legale*, Città di Castello-Bari 1946, pp. 307-309). The problem, however, does not seem to be of great contemporary relevance. Already in 1931, in the inaugural address to the 30th Italian Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Prof. Pestalozza asserted that «due to scientific progress, the indication for embryotomy on a living fetus has disappeared.» The state of necessity would thus be eliminated at its root, and anyone who still wished to resort to such operations could no longer justify their destructive intervention even before civil law.
3. Embryotomy and canonical censures
Another issue that agitated the past century regarding embryotomy was whether performing or permitting it incurred the censures attached to abortion.The question was first discussed in treatises and commentaries that appeared after Pius IX’s constitution *Apostolicae Sedis* (1869). Most authors excluded craniotomy and similar operations from the censure (Bertardi, Hilarius a Sexten, Cornelisse, D’Annibale, etc.), and this remained the common opinion until the *Codex Iuris Canonici*. The main reason is that here the act is not one of expulsion, as in abortion, but of extraction after killing.
Even after the *Codex*, few authors take the opposite view (Eichmann, Coronata, Wernz-Vidal, Stockmans). For some, the crime takes on the character of homicide and is thus subject to the irregularity mentioned in can. 685 n. 4 and liable to the penalties of can. 2354. Yet perhaps the criterion to be followed in judging whether this is abortion or something more, based not on the method or technique used in the operation but on the viability of the fetus, is as follows: there is abortion, and thus the related penalties, if the expelled fetus is not viable; if viable, whatever technique is used to kill it, there is embryotomy, which may reasonably be considered homicide with all its moral and legal consequences.
For operations on an ectopic fetus, V. ABORTION.