November 2019 – Article 1:
How many parents would abandon a child? Apparently a lot.
The number of abandoned embryos in the country’s fertility clinics could be in the millions, claims a recent NBC News report.
According to Christine Allen, a fertility doctor who runs a consulting business called Elite IVF, most clinics fertilize far more eggs than they plan to use when performing In Vitro Fertilization (IVF).
“You see [some women] having 40, 50 or 60 eggs retrieved in a cycle and the embryologist gets the orders from her doctor to inseminate all of them—and the question isn’t asked if the patient wants that many inseminated. Nobody’s going to have 30 kids,” Allen told NBC.
Those not implanted, which number far more than ever would be implanted in the woman, are immediately frozen.
Georgia Right to Life (GRTL) believes that couples seeking fertility assistance should only create the number of embryos that will be implanted in a single cycle, which is the requirement in Germany and Italy. Apparently, European countries are more ethically advanced than the United States in this regard.
An abandoned embryo is one for which the client has not paid storage fees – which average $500 to $1000 per year depending on the clinic – and fails to respond to letters and calls from the clinic.
Each Embryo is a Unique Person
What’s usually lost in such revelations is that an embryo is a person — a child who deserves the full rights of Personhood.
Approximately one-third of all frozen embryos at a fertility clinic in Fort Myers have been discarded or abandoned, NBC said.
Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nor the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, require fertility clinics to report how many embryos have been abandoned at their clinics.
Adopting “Snowflake” Babies
At the same time, The New York Times published an article demonstrating that an increasing number of couples are deciding to adopt “snowflake” embryos in order to conceive. They’re nicknamed snowflakes because they are frozen.
The paper noted that 16,000 such embryos were implanted in women between 2000 and 2016, according to reports from the CDC.
Most importantly, experts expect that trend to continue increasing.
Transferring donated embryos is less expensive than almost any alternative to natural pregnancies. Adoption can cost tens of thousands of dollars. A single round of IVF—which many insurance providers do not cover—can run between $12,000 and $17,000.
In contrast, IVF using donated embryos costs an average of $8,000.
Further, the writer said the term embryo adoption is caught up in the abortion debate.
“The issue in the medical community is that by calling it ‘adoption,’ we give too much personhood to the embryo,” Kimberly Tyson, marketing and program director at Snowflakes Embryo Adoption in Loveland, Colo., told the Times.
“As Christians, of course we believe they’re persons, but for the reproductive medical community, if you bestow humanity to a nascent human embryo, you’re interfering with other services that they like very much,” she said.
Faith-based Adoption Agencies
The article also raised the issue that many of the agencies that offer donated embryos, including the vast majority of those supported by federal grants, are affiliated with anti-abortion rights or Christian organizations.
Horrors!
This leads “some people to question whether single, gay couples or others who might be interested, could be missing out,” the article claimed.
“Most traditional IVF facilities are not thrilled with faith-based organizations,” explained Dr. Craig Sweet, who runs Embryo Donation International. Sweet said he would like the government to look a little more closely at the program, and potentially change the selection criteria for grants.
Translation: the federal government should stop providing funds to Christian and other pro-life organizations.
To date, all grant recipients, except two, are affiliated with pro-life or Christian organizations.
Such funds are provided by the Embryo Awareness Adoption Program, run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Grants average about $1 million a year.
Human embryos should not be tossed in the freezer like a bag of broccoli—they are children endowed by God with full Personhood.
GRTL strongly encourages couples considering IVF to only create the number of embryos they plan to use in a single cycle. Please don’t create extra embryos that are either frozen, discarded or destroyed, in research.
Sources: nytimes.com; bioedge.org; necn.com; catholicnewsagency.com.
By Wayne DuBois
Georgia Right to Life
Media Relations Advisor