Nationwide, about 500,000 frozen embryos are in storage at fertility centers. What to do with them is the debate.
Couples who don’t need the excess embryos can choose to donate them to other couples, to medical research or have them destroyed. Many are paralyzed by the options and choose to do nothing, said Michelle Dicken, spokeswoman for the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville.
For fertility clinics, the growing number of embryos represents a practical storage dilemma, she said.
“Without the couples’ written consent, (fertility clinics) can’t do anything with the embryos,” she said. “I’m forever hearing, ‘Oh, we have hundreds of embryos just sitting in tanks.’”
For proponents of embryonic stem-cell research, the embryos represent a source of possible breakthroughs in treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
And for others, largely pro-life organizations such as Nightlight Christian Adoptions in California, the embryos are “pre-born children waiting for a chance at life,” according to a fact sheet on their embryo adoption program, Snowflakes, launched in 1997.
Many who participate in embryo adoption say they strongly are motivated by their Christian faith and a belief that embryos are children.
For other couples struggling to conceive, the option to receive donated embryos can be a much more affordable way to get reproductive assistance, though the implantation of the embryos is still an expense, said Dr. Rink Murray, reproductive endocrinologist with Tennessee Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic in Chattanooga.
The procedure usually costs under $10,000, he said.
The political relevance of embryo adoption hasn’t escaped Marilou Lyons of East Ridge, whose struggles with infertility led her and her husband to embryo adoption and the birth of her now 5-year-old son, Jared.
She said their experience has shown that thousands of embryos frozen in storage don’t have to be destroyed or used for potentially life-saving medical research.
“There is another option that doesn’t kill them and gives them a chance at life,” she said.
Former President George W. Bush echoed that sentiment when announcing his veto of legislation to expand funding for stem-cell research in 2005, during a ceremony attended by children born through the Snowflakes program.
Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said the stem-cell debate is one of the reasons embryo adoption has received so much attention in recent years.
“I think that’s been the driver, absolutely,” Dr. Caplan said. “There’s more ideology and politics going on here than there is scientific reality.”
Health care reporter Emily Bregel has worked at the Chattanooga Times Free Press since July 2006. She previously covered banking and wrote for the Life section. Emily, a native of Baltimore, Md., earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Columbia University. She received a first-place award for feature writing from the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists’ Golden Press Card Contest for a 2009 article about a boy with a congenital heart defect. She ...
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