Is Embryo Adoption Ethical?

Did you know a small, but growing, number of families are turning to embryo adoption programs. Some are of course adopting embryos created during their own in vitro fertilization cycles but others are actually adopting unused embryos to build families of their own. One of the by-products of IVF treatment is the creation of ‘supernumerary embryos’ or pre-embryos. As part of the procedure, more embryos are brought into existence than actually used. The remaining embryos are frozen to be used later if the first trial proves unsuccessful or if the couple wants another child. This debate was touched on a few months back when Sophia Vergara was being sued for the rights to embryos she had created during IVF cycles with a former boyfriend. In Vergara’s case, it was not specifically decided what to do with the frozen embryos.

The organization, Nightlight, established the Snowflakes Program in the year 1997 where unused embryos were put up for adoption for families looking. Since then, over 1,000 families have put their unused embryos up for "adoption" resulting in 424 babies born. 

According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, more than 63,000 babies were born in 2013 from IVF cycles. And as more cycles are completed each year in the U.S., there are an increasing number of embryos left unused.

IVF is the process of fertilization by manually combining an egg and sperm in a laboratory dish, and then transferring the embryo to the uterus. During this type of process it's possible for a fertility clinic to screen the embryos to determine the sex. Technically, either the female or male embryos could be inserted, versus both. 

A women’s fertility decreases much more rapidly than a man’s, and the procedure of harvesting eggs from a woman is much more intense than donating sperm, but this doesn’t necessarily give a woman ownership over these pre-embryos.

This debate could be deemed of the most controversial when it comes to reproductive technology. 

Ethical question arise from a medical standpoint. The accumulation of frozen embryos has resulted in hundreds, perhaps thousands of embryos stocked in the freezers of large fertility clinics. What is the fate of these embryos? Is it ethical to keep them frozen for the rest of time, should patients discard them?

Legal issues arise when embryos are frozen before implantation, and couples separate, which leads to disagreement over what should be done with them.

The question is who has the right to these embryos, once they’re ‘frozen in time’? Scientists have analyzed that frozen embryos can last up to 20 years, talk about commitment. On top of that, the cost of storing them can be up to $1,000 a year.

During IVF, eggs are retrieved from a woman and then mixed with sperm collected from a man (and sometimes even injected with a single sperm in a process called intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI). The fertilized egg, or embryo, is then transferred to the woman’s uterus where it may or may not implant, resulting in a pregnancy. 

"Embryo adoption" is a controversial term in the world of reproductive medicine. The line being debated is whether or now these embryos can be considered children in need of adoptive homes or genetic material like sperm or eggs that can be donated. 

Nightlight's perspective makes a point to use the term adoption as the practice of placing children in homes with loving parents. The donor did at one point create the embryos with the intention of bringing them to life. When they place it with the family will attempt to give them life for which they were created. 

On the contrary, many professionals in the infertility and reproductive rights community fear that using the term adoption is inaccurate and potentially dangerous term to use in regards to the use of donor embryos in IVF. 

Several states are in the process of attempting to pass laws regarding personhood, which would give fertilized eggs the same basic rights as a living human being. However, proposed measures have been defeated or failed to gain the signatures needed to advance through the legislature in Mississippi, Florida,Nevada, California, Montana, Oregon, and Ohio. In Colorado, voters have rejected personhood amendments three times (in 2008, 2010, and 2014).

But for the families who have participated in programs such as Nightlight’s, legal ramifications and politics are hardly on the forefront of their minds. Rather, it’s always all about family — and the many ways in which families are built and grown.