Embryo Donation: One Mom's Story
Submitted Anonymously by a Triplet Mom
Originally printed in November, 2004

"Your children are not 'your' children.  They are the sons and the daughters of life's 
longing for itself.  They come through you, but they are not from you.  And though 
they are with you, they belong not to you.  You can house their bodies, but not their 
souls, for their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow that you cannot visit.  Not even 
in your dreams."

My journey to becoming a mother was certainly not an easy one.  Loss after loss left 
my husband and I heartbroken and in despair.  Just when we thought we had exhausted 
all of our resources (financial, emotional, and medical), we found ourselves pregnant... 
REALLY pregnant!!  The next few years were a complete blur.  Bottles and diapers and 
doctor appointments kept us in a whirlwind, but we never were too busy to thank God 
for the blessings He had bestowed.

As months turned into years, we thought the agony of the fertility treatments was long 
forgotten.  Then one day, a letter arrived with a return address we hadn't seen in years.  
It was a lab report from the center that had conducted our IVF cycles.  We learned that 
we had 12 embryos in storage, and that we would need to make a decision about their 
future.  Of course, we had known as we proceeded through the IVF cycles that we were 
not transferring all of the embryos conceived.  We knew this, but had not given it 
appropriate consideration.  What were we going to do?

That night, absolutely exhausted from another hectic day, my husband and I sat down 
to make an extremely difficult decision.  We were advised by the center that we had 
three options: donate the embryos to research, "discard" the embryos, or continue to 
store the embryos on site.  Since our religious and personal beliefs prevent us from 
considering these embryos as anything other than our children, the first two options 
were out.  The third option, however, did not seem ethical either.  We have had all 
of the children that we can parent successfully, given our resources, so why should 
we continue to "store" these miracles??  We could tell that this was going to be an 
arduous and emotional process.

The next day, I contacted the lab where our embryos were stored and spoke with one of 
the doctors there.  I told her that we could not make a decision and asked if there 
were any other possibility at all for parents to consider.  She mentioned that a very 
small percentage of former patients have decided to donate their embryos to other 
infertile couples, but that she had no further information on that and could not help 
me in any way along those lines.  I wasn't sure at that point how I felt about that 
option, and certainly not how my husband felt about it, but I immediately got to work 
on researching this avenue.

The next few weeks were spent "interviewing" clinics and programs across the country 
that would receive donated embryos for the purpose of transferring them to infertile 
couples.  The programs that I interviewed fell into one of three categories: open 
adoption programs, blind donation programs, and "guided" donation programs.

We first considered Snowflakes, an open adoption program.  In this program, biological 
parents are actively involved in the process of choosing the birth parents of their 
embryos (and visa versa).   All this is done by creating personal and family profiles, 
including pictures, which are exchanged between the two families.  The process is 
entirely open, and the families can maintain contact.  We found the Snowflakes program 
to be run by extremely professional and compassionate people; we decided, however, that 
an open program was not for us.  The responsibility of choosing the actual birth parents 
was absolutely overwhelming.  We also have no way of knowing how contact with this family 
would impact our children.  How could they be expected to understand this at their ages?  
This is all almost completely uncharted territory, and we felt our primary responsibility 
was to the children we had already borne.

We next considered a blind adoption program.  In this particular clinic, embryos were 
received and then given to waiting women in the order that they were accepted into the 
program.  Donor couples were asked to provide an extensive medical and personal history, 
but no identifying information would ever be exchanged between the parties.  Recipients 
could request embryos of a particular race or ethnicity only, but donors were not 
allowed to make any requests regarding the recipients of their embryos.  This was a 
problem for my husband and I.  We certainly did not want to choose physical attributes 
of the recipients, but there were some characteristics on which we must insist.  For 
example, we wished to donate our embryos to a married, heterosexual, Christian couple.  
A representative from this program explained that the embryos were a "free-will donation" 
with "no strings attached."  She even compared donating embryos to donating blood, and 
that nobody who gives blood is allowed to earmark it for a certain segment of the population.  
This gave my husband and I both an uneasy feeling.  A blind donation was certainly not 
for us, either.

After a great deal of work, we were fortunate to have found a program with which we felt 
comfortable.  The center we chose facilitates embryo donation between biological parents 
and recipients whose racial, marital, and religious status matches that requested by the 
donor.  Requests were allowed in those three categories only; for example, we could not 
request recipients in a certain income bracket, educational level, or hair color.  No 
identifying information is ever released to either family, but the donor family is notified 
if a live birth results from a transfer (and only that information; sex, date, and place 
of birth is not released).  This center also offered some counseling sessions over the 
phone and I did speak with a social worker at length.  Once we made our final decision, 
the new center made all the arrangements for the multi-state transfer of our embryos.  
We signed the release forms and prayed that we'd made the right decision.

It has been some time since we donated our embryos, and I have had some more time to think 
about it.  During one of the conversations I had with the recipient clinic's social worker, 
she expressed shock that our center had never offered pre-procedure counseling regarding 
the potential of excess embryos.  I agree that their failure in this aspect is a terrible 
negligence.  We can never know if this type of advisement would have changed the way we 
proceeded with our IVF cycles, but it certainly would have given us the luxury of time 
to together decide how we should handle this and to consider all of the possible 
ramifications of such an event.

I sometimes wonder what the future will bring.  When our laws finally catch up with science, 
how will this impact the confidentiality of our donation?  Maybe a person's right to know 
their biological parents supercedes a biological parent's right to privacy.  And, when will 
we tell our own children about all this?  And then, what about their right to find their 
full, biological siblings if they desire?  The questions go on and on.  The decision to 
donate our embryos, and then the search for the right recipient center, was extremely 
difficult.  Despite all of the doubts and fears, we feel at peace with this decision because 
it was the natural extension of our most sacred beliefs.