Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Nightlight Christian Adoptions, home of the eight-year-old Snowflakes embryo adoption program, received $506,000 in 2002 (roughly half that year's grant) and $329,000 in 2004. Snowflakes functions not merely as a donor-recipient matching service but also, in many ways, as a traditional adoption agency, requiring prospective adopting families -- who are selected by the genetic parents -- to undergo screenings and complete classes on the raising of adopted children. Since 1997, they have matched 207 genetic families with 136 adopting families, with a live-birth success rate of 35 percent.
"Nightlight Christian Adoptions does take the position that the embryo is an unborn child, and we have 85-plus children here and on the way that unequivocally prove that," says Lori Maze, director of the Snowflakes program. "We also believe that children are adopted and not donated, but we don't use the term 'adoption' to further any political or legal agenda. When we use the term 'adoption,' as opposed to 'donation,' we are using it from a social service perspective, focusing on the child who results from the adoption of those embryos. Any resistance to embryos being adopted is simply a matter of some portions of society being overly sensitive to anything that they perceive might give greater value or importance to the human embryo."
Likewise, Nightlight's executive director, Ron Stoddart, said in a 2004 press conference that the use of the word "adoption" is a means of recognizing the emotional effect of the arrangement on the child. "We don't talk about children being born from an embryo transfer as being 'donated,' we talk about them being 'adopted.' By creating a positive emotional framework for embryo transfers from one family to another, we respect the contribution of the genetic family and, most importantly, reinforce the identity of the adopted child."
Snowflakes, however, has not sat on the political sidelines. That press conference -- held in the Capitol last September with seven Republican senators present including Rick Santorum, R-Pa. -- was sponsored by Snowflakes to voice its opposition to H.R. 4682, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2004, which would revoke the Bush policy limiting federal funding to embryonic stem cell lines created prior to August 2001.
Critics of embryo adoption claim that proponents of the term tend to exaggerate the number of actual available, viable embryos -- along with the notion that they're trapped somewhere in a "frozen orphanage" waiting to be rescued. According to a May 2003 study conducted by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology with the Rand Corp. and published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, of the estimated 400,000 embryos cryogenically preserved in the U.S., about 88 percent still belong to the families who created them; only 2 percent were earmarked for donation to others. What's more, their quality deteriorates over time, and many do not survive the thawing process.
Might some of those who own the 88 percent be persuaded to offer them for donation when they feel their families are complete? Maybe, but it's a hard sell. In other words, organizations promoting embryo donation -- no matter what they call it -- have their work cut out for them. Far removed from the rhetorical skirmishes and political banner waving, actual couples face the nuances and complexities of infertility, agonizing over their decisions.
A study by Dr. Susan Klock, of Northwestern University's Feinberg Medical School, found that 20 to 30 percent of couples who freeze embryos after IVF say that when the time comes to decide what to do with them, they'll donate -- but three years later, two-thirds of them change their minds. Attorney Crockin says that of the dozens of people who come to her every year for legal help with donating their embryos to another couple, one-half to three-quarters wind up backing out after they receive counseling. And she hears similar numbers from her colleagues nationwide. "We can't get 5 percent of our patients to even think about it," says registered nurse Mary Fusillo, the third-party coordinator at Houston's Center for Reproductive Medicine, a member of RESOLVE's board of directors, and herself an initially reluctant embryo donor.
Fusillo also says that among her peers with frozen embryos in storage -- which can cost several hundred dollars a year in storage fees -- offering them up for stem cell research would be Plan A. Not comfortable with either donation or destruction, they see no other Plan B but to keep them around. "I'm not doing anything with them until I'm 50," she once heard a woman say. "I can't bear the thought of giving them to someone else, or destroying them, so I'm going to leave them in the freezer."
What makes donation so challenging? For many people, it's just difficult to think about somebody else's body -- or home -- housing your baby. Those who work with families considering embryo donation say that at first -- especially when they identify with another couple's infertility struggles -- it sounds like an amazing, generous, satisfying thing to do. But once they have children -- or when they don't -- it becomes hard to stomach the notion of someone else having a child who's a genetic sibling to theirs, or someone else having the child they couldn't.
Efforts at raising embryo donation "awareness" may be increasing, and some may be effective -- alarmingly so -- in shifting public consciousness, even subliminally, toward a view of the embryo as an adoptable human. But persuading women to donate their embryos is another story. Politics and religion aside, many women already do view an embryo as potential life -- life that they gave. Which is precisely why they won't give it away.
