This was an exceptionally interesting article for me as it hits so close to home. My beautiful twin girls were conceived (after many years of trying) through IVF and as it turns out we still have four embryos frozen. Every year I get a letter asking me if I want to continue storing my embryos and reminding me of my options if I choose not to continue with storage.And so far each year we have chosen to continue storing them, the thought of anything else makes me feel nauseous.I think that we will more than likely have some of our frozen embryos implanted as we would like 1 more child but chances are good that if we are again successful the second time around, 2 or 3 of the remaining embryos will not be used and we will one day have to make a decision as to what to do with them. Infertility treatment is an emotionally and financially draining process, and it’s difficult to just let go of something that you worked so long and hard to make.
You can read the full article here.
Life on Ice
In 1995, a California doctor took responsibility for thousands of unwanted embryos. He’s still figuring out what to do with them.
Police cruisers typically escort heads of state, but on a November morning in 1995, the VIP heading down California’s Highway 405 was an ordinary-looking moving truck. It was, however, carrying some particularly fragile cargo: several metal tanks, each just larger than a beer keg, containing a total of roughly 2,000 frozen human embryos. They were being transported from a scandal-plagued IVF clinic in Laguna Hills, Calif., to their new adoptive home in Newport Beach. Today, many still remain there, unclaimed. The embryos’ unusual journey illustrates just how complicated the business of assisted reproduction can get.
The story starts at Saddleback Memorial Hospital in Laguna Hills. The fertility clinic there had been shuttered earlier in 1995, when an investigation found that its doctors had mixed up embryos and impregnated women with eggs that weren’t theirs. As many as 300 patients were thought to have been involved, and at least three cases had surfaced in which women had unwittingly given birth to children not theirs. The clinic’s top doctors, Ricardo Asch and Jose Balmaceda, had fled the county. Thousands of unused or extra embryos were left behind, and because the clinic was run by the University of California, Irvine, they were in the custody of the state.
Officials asked several nearby fertility clinics to take the orphan embryos, but initially no one was willing; most clinic doctors preferred to stay clear of the scandal’s taint. Dr. Robert Anderson felt differently. “To me, it seemed unfair to the couples,” he says. Anderson agreed to house the frozen embryos at the clinic he’d opened three years earlier in Newport Beach, the Southern California Center for Reproductive Medicine. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” he says with more than a hint of resignation. “I actually thought I was doing a good thing.”
Anderson signed a contract laying out how he would take care of the embryos and releasing him from any liability related to their origins. He didn’t ask for payment, and he never suspected he’d be taking care of some of the embryos nearly 15 years later.
His staff began the process of tracking down the patients connected to each set of embryos using records from the Saddleback clinic. When the patients could be found, they were asked to make a decision about what to do with their embryos, and until they decided, they were billed for storage, just as Anderson’s own clients are. But because the University of California clinic was one of the first fertility centers in the world, many of its patients lived abroad, and tracking them down proved to be difficult. “We did what we could do,” Anderson says. Today, about a thousand of the Saddleback embryos remain.
Even if the patients are available to make a choice about the embryos, the decision often isn’t an easy one. Many couples opt to freeze extra embryos created for in vitro fertilization treatments; when they’re finished with IVF, they must decide what to do with these little clusters of cells, which were a challenge to produce and expensive. There are an estimated half million unused embryos, some decades old, being stored around the nation in fertility centers like Anderson’s. “There are huge differences in the thinking about what these embryos represent,” Anderson says. “From ‘they’re leftover biological material’ to ‘they’re little people’.”