The Great Frozen Embryo Debate

The Gibsons were happy to talk about their experience, which was covered in national outlets like CNN and The Atlantic. “When we first thought of embryo adoption, it seemed very strange and unfamiliar. We did a lot of praying and soul-searching about it,” Tina says. Eventually they came to the conclusion that embryo donation is consistent with their anti­abortion outlook. “We really believe this was saving a life. For us, an embryo is a life.”

Many religious Christians share the Gibsons’ belief that life begins at conception, whether it happens in or outside of the womb. IVF patients with these views often try to use or donate all their extra embryos. Another less common option is to have what is known as a compassionate transfer, in which doctors place an embryo in a woman’s womb during a point in her cycle when it’s unlikely to survive.

Others see an embryo more as a rough blueprint for a baby than a baby itself. After Ona Brazwell had received treatment for a rare ovarian cancer, it didn’t look as though the then nearly 40-year-old engineer from Maine would be able to get pregnant. When artificial insemination and IVF with her own egg and donated sperm failed, she found embryo donations.

Brazwell opted for an open donation, as opposed to an anonymous one. That way her potential future children could “know their roots,” she says. She hit dead end after dead end and was in “a dark place” when she saw a post on a surrogacy discussion board: “Seeking Christian Couple for Anonymous Donation.” Brazwell wasn’t Christian, in a relationship, or in pursuit of an anonymous donation. She wrote the couple anyway, and eventually they agreed to an open donation. Today she has twins born from the embryos, a son and a daughter. The children see their embryo donors, whom they call “auntie” and “uncle,” at least once a year.

Since giving birth to her children, Brazwell has been looking into epigenetics, or how certain genes can switch on and off. This happens during pregnancy, when a mother’s mental health, nutrition, and hormones can affect a child’s long-term ­development. “There’s all sorts of research out there showing that stuff is happening in the womb,” she says. Over the years Brazwell has observed shared physical similarities with her kids—“My daughter looks just like me as a child,” she says—the fact they gestated inside of her makes them, in ways scientists are only beginning to comprehend, also physically hers.

Unlike Brazwell’s or the Gibsons’ donors, I wasn’t willing to recycle my extra embryos. After the miscarriage and Levi, we still had two left over. We don’t want more children, but I also can’t imagine them being born to someone else. Would he have my smile? Would she have my husband’s animated brow? I’d always be looking. (My husband feels otherwise.)

It’s been a year since we sent in the paperwork informing our clinic that we would like our embryos to be used for research in the lab. By now there’s a good chance that our frosties have helped to train an incoming embryologist, or to test a new freezing technique. When friends and family raise eyebrows at this decision, I explain that it costs $1,200 a year to keep an embryo on ice at our clinic, an amount that would better serve our sons’ college funds. But it isn’t just about money. The decision was also borne of a desire to free myself of those nagging what-ifs—What if we implanted those embryos? What if they turned into children? What if I am a terrible person because I don’t want to give them a chance?—and focus on the what is.

There are still days when those questions torment me. But most of the time, when I think about those embryos, I think about what they already brought me: my second child, a child who wasn’t going to come into the world the old-­fashioned way. Levi is where my embryos story ends. And it’s my story to tell.

Elissa Strauss lives in Oakland, California; she has written for The New York Times and Slate and is a contributing writer for cnn.com.