Regulations prohibit fertility clinics from discarding embryos without patient consent unless parents abandon them. Workers consider embryos abandoned when at least five years pass and parents fail to respond to the clinics’ efforts to contact them.
But some embryos have proven resilient. In 2010, a healthy boy was born after he spent 20 years as a frozen embryo. RSC’s oldest embryos date back to 1991, one year after the clinic opened. Ivani says the mother hasn’t paid the storage bills for years or responded to the center’s calls or letters. Still, RSC hasn’t discarded any abandoned embryos, including these nearly 26 years old.
But many women haven’t forgotten. Three rounds of IVF gave Ruth Whippman and her husband a longed-for second son, but also four surplus frozen embryos, stored in San Ramon.
Last May, she wrote about her conflicted feelings in The Guardian: “Every time I picture them I get a visceral jolt of maternal feeling. Sweethearts, you must be so cold in there without your coats. I am their mother.”
The Whippmans opted for advanced screening, a process that reveals chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. Technicians pluck a few cells off of the embryos, either fresh or thawed, and test them for potential problems. The defects aren’t always potentially fatal but may still earn an embryo a label as unviable.
Thawed embryos can be refrozen, with a 3 percent risk of irrevocable damage. Workers at RSC labeled only two of the Whippmans’ remaining embryos as “normal.” They also reported that all four were boys.
For Whippman, finding out she had boys brought more “emotional resonance,” and she planned to give at least one of the two normal embryos a chance to live. “I picture the freezer boys like our sons, waiting for us to come and rescue them with the same crumpled, anxious expressions they wear if I am ever five minutes late to pick them up from preschool.”
Maternal instincts are strong, and many couples disagree about what to do with surplus embryos. RSC’s Hinckley said marital tension is common. In Des Moines, Iowa, Amanda Fletcher and her husband had a son naturally, then twins via IVF, leaving seven remaining embryos. Two attempts to use their remaining embryos failed, and three embryos remained frozen.
In a phone interview, Fletcher said she wanted to keep trying to conceive, but added: “It became a hard subject to discuss in our marriage. He didn’t want anything to do with them ... but I was constantly yearning for them.”
The yearning for children and the moral dilemmas are a reminder that IVF decisions aren’t just medical. The Catholic Church opposes IVF: In 2008, the Vatican called the existence of frozen embryos a “grave injustice.” From a scientific standpoint, a human life begins once a sperm cell joins with an egg—regardless of whether the event occurs in a lab dish.
Paige Cunningham of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity says some pastors are “waking up to the reality that this is going on. … If we say life begins at conception … what we say about abortion applies both to the baby in the womb and to the embryo in the petri dish.”
The Fletchers decided to donate their embryos to another couple through Nightlight Christian Adoptions’ “Snowflakes” program. Two embryos survived thawing: One resulted in a baby boy born to the adoptive mother in June, the same month as Fletcher’s other three children.
Fletcher and the adoptive mother, who lives in California, became Facebook friends. The first time Fletcher saw a picture of the boy, she cried. He looked almost exactly like her other children. She has recently found peace: “It’s all about ‘what if?’ Would he have grown inside of me? At least I can say I gave [my embryos] a chance to live.”
Frozen in indecision
Every 1 in 8 couples has trouble conceiving or sustaining a pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That factor, along with an increase in individuals and homosexual couples using assisted reproduction, is driving the nation’s $3.5 billion fertility industry—expected to reach $4 billion by 2018 and $21.6 billion globally by 2020, according to Allied Market Research.
The average cost of one cycle of IVF is $12,400, excluding costly medicine, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Most couples need more than one treatment (fertility experts recommend three).
Some women view their extra embryos as “insurance,” in case they want more children or one dies. Seven in 10 couples are undecided about their extra embryos, according to a 2005 University of California, San Francisco, study. A 2009 survey found that nearly two-thirds of couples kept their 5-year-frozen embryos, either out of indecision or disagreement, or in order to maintain their potential. Over 30 percent planned to keep them frozen indefinitely, with 22 percent favoring donation to science and only 6 percent planning to give them to another infertile couple.
Comments
Minivan Man
Posted: Tue, 01/17/2017 01:13 pmDoes anyone else see the supreme chaos created by IVF? As much as responsible Christians try to make sense of it, defend it, and make rules for it, you are left with embryos in the dumpster or frozen in a container for years and years. Couples will be sentimental over their “snowflake” babies; what to do with them, which ones to implant, what might have been. Consider the anguish, uncertainty, and gravity of the decision. The obvious dilemma is a clue that something could be wrong here. Could we have gotten involved in a process that we have no business being involved in?
The article is right when it references pastors “waking up” to the hypocrisy that aborting a baby is wrong, but destroying or freezing embryos forever is okay. I struggle to understand how so many people can be fervently against abortion, but so easily accepting of a God-dishonoring process such as IVF. I suspect many believers don’t really believe life begins at conception. They say they do, but when they can’t conceive a child, they shrug off the “extra” embryos as simply the price it costs to get what they want. And please spare me the pious “donate to science” reply when discussing leftover embryos. This is a tragedy, and we need to speak up!
The lab director says “It is hard for me” to dump a bunch of embryos in the dumpster. Apparently not that hard, since she keeps doing it. Even the Catholic church calls this a “grave injustice”. It is true.
Where is the zeal for defending God’s glory?