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Now that it is under way, the liquidation will not take long. Last Thursday workers at fertility clinics across Britain started taking vials out of liquid-nitrogen storage vats and allowing them to thaw. In some cases, the tiny specks inside--each the size of a pinpoint and consisting of one to four cells--were dosed for good measure with rubbing alcohol or salt water. By sometime next week, it will all be over. About 3,300 fertilized human eggs and potentially viable embryos will have been destroyed.

Parental intervention can still save some of these barely visible blobs of protoplasm, and last week a few did get last-minute reprieves. But despite the best efforts of clinic officials, the majority of these "parents"--couples who had donated egg and sperm in an attempt at in-vitro fertilization (IVF)--cannot or will not be located. Without word from the parents within five years, British law requires that the embryos be destroyed. And so, after last-ditch appeals to the courts and Prime Minister John Major failed, the clinics began dumping the eggs and embryos like so much abandoned property.

The world did not let them go quietly. The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, denounced the destruction as a "prenatal massacre"; protesters held a vigil outside Westminster Cathedral before the event and memorial services afterward; and people across Europe offered to "adopt" the frozen cells to preserve them. Childless couples bitterly lamented that they would gladly have taken the embryos for themselves. And some clinic workers contemplated going to jail rather than carry out the law, though they yielded in the end.

In one sense, the furor was an artificial one. Embryos of this sort are routinely destroyed in small batches every week, as they have been since the 1980s. The term embryo, moreover, carries an emotional charge that may be misleading. These entities consist of a handful of cells, the very earliest stages of the nine-month process that turns a fertilized egg into a full-term baby. They were frozen only a few days at most after conception; they would not even merit the designation fetus until after three months in the womb. "You can't regard these as little people," says Robert Forman, clinical director of the London Gynecology and Fertility Center. "They are living cells. They are not humans."

But the unprecedented scale of the event, and the fact that it was carried out by government order, focused public attention on a thorny ethical issue at the heart of IVF. Because the procedure is so hit-or-miss, clinics routinely create backup embryos. But what do they do with the leftovers?

That choice is almost always left to the parents. They can donate them for research; they can have them destroyed; they can keep the cells frozen for later use or give them anonymously to another couple. Right-to-life groups do not like the first two of these options; but even they recognize that it is difficult to galvanize public opinion against them.