Unused Embryos Pose Difficult Issue: What to Do With Them

By Tamar Lewin, New York Times, June 17, 2015

After years of infertility, Angel and Jeff Watts found a young egg donor to help them have a baby. They fertilized her eggs with Mr. Watts’s sperm and got 10 good embryos. Four of those embryos were transferred to Ms. Watts’s womb, resulting in two sets of twins — Alexander and Shelby, now 4 years old, and Angelina and Charles, not yet 2.

But that left six frozen embryos, and on medical advice, Ms. Watts, 45, had no plans for more children. So in December she took to Facebook to try to find a nearby Tennessee family that wanted them.

“We have 6 good quality frozen six-day-old embryos to donate to an amazing family who wants a large family,” she posted. “We prefer someone who has been married several years in a steady loving relationship and strong Christian background, and who does not already have kids, but wants a boat load.”

In storage facilities across the nation, hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos — perhaps a million — are preserved in silver tanks of liquid nitrogen. Some are in storage for cancer patients trying to preserve their chance to have a family after chemotherapy destroys their fertility. But most are leftovers from the booming assisted reproduction industry, belonging to couples like the Wattses, who could not conceive naturally.

And increasingly families, clinics and the courts are facing difficult choices on what to do with them — decisions that involve profound questions about the beginning of life, the definition of family and the technological advances that have opened new reproductive possibilities.

Since the first American “test tube” baby was born in 1981, in vitro fertilization, at a cost of $12,000 or more per cycle, has grown to account for more than 1.5 percent of all United States births.

The embryos with the greatest chance of developing into a healthy baby are used first, and the excess are frozen; a 2002 survey found about 400,000 frozen embryos, and another in 2011 estimated 612,000. Now, many reproductive endocrinologists say, the total may be about a million.

Couples are generally glad to have the leftover embryos, backups in case a pregnancy does not result from the first tries.

“But if I ask what they’ll do with them, they often have a Scarlett O’Hara response: I’ll think about that tomorrow,” said Dr. Mark V. Sauer, of Columbia University’s Center for Women’s Reproductive Care. “Couples don’t always agree about the moral and legal status of the embryo, where life begins, and how religion enters into it, and a lot of them end up kicking the can down the road.’’

There are no national statistics on what happens with these leftover embryos. As a practical matter, many sit in storage indefinitely, academic researchers say, either at fertility clinics or other facilities, costing $300 to $1,200 a year. A small percentage of people stop paying the storage fees and leave it to the clinic or facility to figure out what to do.

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