To all the embryos I've loved before... [POLL]

I know, I know... another stem-cell diary.  But bear with me.  I write as someone who almost "crossed a moral boundary," and would have done so with a happy heart.  My husband and I are were going to among those with embryos in the freezer and this is our tale.

The background

Like many women who are unable to bear children, I have wondered often whether I would ever have kids.  When we were told three years ago that a pregnancy could kill me, my husband and I looked for other options.  Our first choice was adoption.  Fast forward 7 or 8 months and we received the referral of a baby girl from Khabarovsk, Russia.  After learning from a specialist that she looked exceptionally healthy, we also learned that I would now require supplemental oxygen when I slept and exercised.  Our referral was pulled and our adoption agency scrambled to find other options.  We talked with a friend who worked with DFS and also applied to private agencies that handled domestic adoption.  In Russia, supplemental oxygen is equated with hospitalization.  In the United States, it doesn't seem to have that much better of a reputation. We were turned down again and again, in spite of letters from all my doctors attesting to my ability to care for children.

The World of Assisted Repro

I am not one to give up hope too easily, so my husband and I turned to the foreign (to us) world of surrogacy and assisted reproduction.  We are working with a gestational surrogate (a woman who carries, but is not genetically related to, a baby for another person or couple).

Early on the process, our reproductive endocrinologist wanted us to start thinking about what we would do with the embryos we didn't use.  Our clinic would only transfer two embryos at a time.  Unlike with women with fertility problems, transferring embryos into a healthy surrogate carries with it a high probability of success.  There is a 45% chance of twins if two embryos are transferred.  Some clinics cater to the intended parents' fear that they are not going to have success and transfer 4 or 5 embryos, which is a recipe for emotional and medical disaster.

We were given the options of destroying our unused embryos, donating them to research, or donating them to another couple.  The last option had us concocting Hollywood-esque narratives of our child marrying his or her sibling without even knowing it.  Donating them to research was a no-brainer.  My husband and I said that to our endocrinologist without missing a beat.  He said, "Well, think about it.  You still have time to think about it."  Assuring patient autonomy in this decision is critical.

We've got embryos!

The day after fertilization, we had a huge number of embryos: 29 to be exact.  We were planning to freeze the ones that made it to day 6, so that if this cycle didn't work, we'd be able to try again.  We also considered what in the surrogacy world is called a "sibling project."  

I'd like to be able to say that nothing had changed in my attitude towards those extra embryos when they came into existence, the ones we wouldn't use, but I would be lying.  I began having funny ideas of bringing them all to gestation.  A veritable clan.  We could line the living room with bunk beds and I would make large batches of spaghetti.  And each and every one of them would be special to me.  Where were these ideas coming from?!!

But much as I saw potential in those little 8 and 10-celled blastocysts, I value the potential in the already born.  Take our friend.  He's battling a nasty subtype of acute leukemia.  Right now, he's going through experimental treatment to prepare for a stem-cell transplant.  There wasn't a bone-marrow match in his family that was close enough.  I want to see him come home from the hospital.  I want his wife to have another 30 or 40 years with him.  I want him to hold our baby.  He is my touchstone for the potential of stem-cell research.

Ethical Issues

Mother Jones has some interesting articles about assisted reproduction in their August 2006 issue.  They highlight many of the ethical issues that really bother me.  Some clinics withhold services from patients who are single or gay.  Most insurance does not cover infertility, making assisted reproduction the domain of people with incomes that can cover it.

The disposition of embryos, on the other hand, troubles me less.  Embryos fail to implant all the time in "natural" reproduction.  Or they implant and slough off before a woman even knows she's pregnant.  Potential is being lost all the time.

Stem-cell research has the potential to give life.  Years of life.  Life to the already living.  How can we prioritize 10-cells over 10-trillion?

Conclusion

By the time our two excellent embryos were transferred into our surrogate, there were none left that were good enough quality to freeze.