Edwards, who won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for co-developing in-vitro fertilization, has died this week.
The couple had tried to get pregnant in vain for five years until Dion underwent in-vitro fertilization.
Last year researchers in the private sector culled stem cells from donated embryos that had been produced for in-vitro fertilization.
Frist's principles include banning human cloning and allowing taxpayer dollars for research only on embryos created for in-vitro fertilization and not from abortions.
The Vatican has over recent decades issued blanket condemnations of artificial methods of birth control, in-vitro fertilization, therapeutic and reproductive cloning, and human embryonic stem cell research.
Even more radical was the invention, in 1978, of in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, the now-common technique in which egg and sperm meet in a laboratory petri dish and create an embryo that is then implanted in the would-be mother's womb.
Butler is understandably a little bit whiny and mopey, as Annie works through the adoption bureaucracy while continuing to recover from a serious depression over the years of miscarriages, in-vitro-fertilization attempts and fertility drugs.
In practice, the embryos used in the collection of stem cells were left over from attempts to assist reproduction -- donated by couples who used in vitro fertilization.
In Massachusetts, for example, every insurance policy must cover in vitro fertilization, even if you're a 25-year-old male, or a nun.
The basic techniques of human embryo creation that Dr. Edwards pioneered form the technical foundation of in vitro fertilization, human cloning techniques, genetic screening of human embryos and embryonic-stem-cell research.
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But creating a stem cell requires destroying embryos when they are five-day-old balls of a hundred cells, such as fertilized eggs discarded after an in vitro fertilization.
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