Donating Embryos

This can be a touchy topic and is usually one of the flash points for opponents of IVF and other assisted reproductive techniques: What will you do if you are lucky enough to have any leftover embryos after a successful pregnancy?

Here are the choices: Keep the embryos to try another pregnancy. Donate them top another couple. Donate them to research. Destroy them.

Before any embryos were even in question, before any ART was even begun, my husband and I had to sign pages and pages of papers instructing our clinic what we wanted done with ours. Every scenario was played out – in case of my death, in case of his death, in case of divorce….who gets what and what shall we do with these? (I’ve found, you have to keep these serious conversations lighthearted and peppered with some humor because they can get incredibly heavy.) But having the discussions beforehand are so necessary. Remember what happened to Natalie Evans?

There was an article in my alumni magazine this month written by a couple debating this question now that they have two healthy children and aren’t planning on more. Leah Kaplan wrote:

I lacked the requisite combination of detachment and magnanimity to offer them up to research. Nor was I prepared to donate them, anonymously or otherwise, to another couple…Destroying the embryos seemed no better option. My recent membership in the “mothers of multiples” club notwithstanding, I still identified with my friends of “advanced maternal age,” women whose infertility ordeals I shared for so long. Discarding what they were still struggling to achieve felt like an affront.

In the end, Leah and her husband decide to “keep paying the bill” for their cryopreservation. But what happens when there is a couple who want to donate their embryos to another couple trying to conceive and are stymied because their clinic failed to meet donor blood testing time lines set forth in new FDA regulations made effective in 2005? What happens when a couple is told they can do nothing with their embryos, at least not in the USA?

This is the question my friend Daisy is asking. Please go visit her at Behind Schedule to read the details and share any info you may have.