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Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
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So Many Embryos

CHRISTIAN GROUP OFFERS IN VITRO ADOPTION SERVICE

By James McCoy

Their eight-celled human bodies magnify the questions about the soul. "I question, where does their soul exist?" said Joanne Davidson of Christian Adoption and Family Services in Brea. "I know that we have a soul, and I believe that life begins at conception, so," asks Davidson, a conservative Presbyterian, "I wonder a lot about, what does that mean for these children? When a baby dies, do all babies go to heaven, or just the ones that would have been believers?"

"All those questions are magnified when we're talking six or eight cells," she says, "little tiny things! Yeah, but those six to eight cells put into a simple body, whether it's mine or the woman next to me, will still become a human. They're human from moment one."

These human beings are embryos conceived by in vitro fertilization and subsequently frozen. "Spare embryos," as they are sometimes called, there is but one chance in 20 that any one of them will ever be born. Year after year, those odds can only get longer as these human beings neither grow nor die but remain in suspended animation. In 1989, there were 3,715 frozen embryos in the United States. Today, there are more than 100,000.

To save at least some of them Davidson and Christian Adoption have instituted a program called "Snowflakes." Is that, I ask, because every frozen human embryo, like every snowflake, is not only frozen but unique? "And created by God," Davidson replies, "and fragile." So far "Snowflakes" has rescued one baby. The program has kept the adopting couple's identity secret, but Davidson tells me that they were infertile. Their baby, genetically unrelated to either of them, was knit together for the full nine months in the adopting mother's womb. She was born December 31. Since then, Davidson has been contacted by five couples who want put their frozen embryos (more than 60 altogether) up for adoption. Many more couples have contacted her seeking to adopt.

The embryo adopted last year was from a couple who "had a biological child, and then triplets through in vitro," Davidson said. "So they had five kids under the age of two and a half, and they still had 20 remaining embryos.... They were searching for at least six months for a Christian agency.... They wanted a Christian agency to do an adoption in the legal sense of it, and place them with a Christian family. "We were able to match them with a Christian family," Davidson went on. "That was a 'God-thing.'" Davidson sees God's providence operating throughout the adoption process. It takes faith to see the "take-home baby," as they are commonly known, as the product of God's will and not chance; because "it's a total numbers game," Davidson said, when it comes to in vitro fertilization. In vitro clinics "harvest as many eggs as possible from the woman," Davidson said. "So we have couples who have fertilized 36, 42...huge numbers.

"There's a program locally," she went on, "that guarantees that you'll get pregnant, but they require that you implant nine (embryos). So in order to have a money-back guarantee, you have to promise to abort." The Centers for Disease Control, the federal government's health information service, has a website (www.cdc.gov). One page in its section on Artificial Reproductive Technologies says that "37 percent of all ART births were multiple births (twins, triplets, and more), compared with 2 percent of births in the general population. Multiple births are associated with greater problems, including medical complications and higher caesarean-section rates among mothers and prematurity, low birth weight, and developmental disabilities among infants."

The solution to these "greater problems" is in the Centers for Disease Control webpage: "multifetal pregnancy reduction" is "a procedure...used to decrease the number of fetuses a woman carries and thereby improve the chances that the remaining fetuses will survive and develop into healthy infants." "In other words, abortion," said Davidson. She cited a Glamour magazine article where a woman with four embryos growing in her womb watched her doctor "systematically abort two of them." How traumatic, Davidson pointed out, even "from a secular standpoint."

Davidson, 33, thinks abortion is morally wrong. When she was 27, she became a single mother, a single mother who chose adoption. At 19, she chose abortion and "I knew that wasn't somewhere I was going to go again," she said. "I don't judge anyone who has an abortion, but I also don't want anybody to suffer the loss I've suffered. I relate to the genetic parents because of that: having a child that another couple can raise, being a blessing to that couple." With this thought in mind, Davidson left a successful marketing career to work as a spokeswoman for Christian Adoption.

Regarding in vitro fertilization, however, "which I know in the Catholic Church isn't a good thing," Davidson said, "I haven't developed an opinion on it yet." Christian Adoption's policy is similar. While it has recourse to these techniques for embryo adoption, it rejects abortion after implantation. "In our program, we ask that they be willing to implant only as many as they are willing to carry," Davidson said. "We haven't had anybody fight it yet."

There are two rounds in the numbers game; in the first, you draw straws. Davidson explained that the frozen embryos are stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen, in little glass straws. "Say I have three straws with two of them in each; and I thaw the first straw and one of them survives; and I thaw the second straw and one survives; and I want to put in at least three (embryos)--so do I thaw another straw?

"Okay, we'll take these two and come back later," she went on. "For what if all four survive and we don't want to put in four?"

Embryos are decimated during the thawing. "When you freeze them there's a protocol and when you thaw them you have to follow exactly the same protocol in reverse," she explained. The original protocol is supplied by the freezing clinic; but using different equipment is enough to throw the thawing off--with inevitably fatal results.

Couldn't the embryos be thawed at the clinic which froze them? I asked. Davidson replied that, then, you have the logistical problems of flying at least the mother to that clinic. "Even if we are losing them in the thawing process," she added, "we still feel like we're giving them a chance at life; and that's letting God have control on which ones survive and which ones don't. If they stay frozen, there's no chance."

In their first embryo adoption, eight of the 20 frozen embryos were thawed first. Three of the eight survived and were implanted but didn't attach themselves to the adoptive mother's womb. So "we thawed the remaining twelve in order to get three viable," Davidson said. "We implanted the three viable and one of them took."

I asked Davidson how she felt when she first held that baby after it was born. Remembering, she smiled. "I didn't think of it as different from any other baby," she said. "It's not like this was a freak of nature."

The walls of the Huntington Reproductive Center in Pasadena are covered with pictures of babies that don't look different from any other baby. Now in its tenth year, the in vitro fertilization clinic has helped bring more than 3,000 babies to birth; about 300 babies will be born this year. Huntington Reproductive was the clinic which Christian Adoption used for its first "Snowflakes" baby. Gayle Norbryhn, a nurse practioner specializing in fertility treatment and women's health, is the clinic's resource person for the joint Snowflakes effort. "In the U.S., there are so many embryos," Norbryhn said, just after sending statistics on those recently frozen from the clinic to the CDC, "and they just sit there. And this is a nice way for the couple to adopt one," she said.

"There's some people who would rather adopt an embryo," Norbryhn went on. "I think more than anything else it's a moral, ethical thing. Here's an already created embryo just waiting to be born."

Norbryhn welcomes the Christian Adoption agency taking over the some of the difficult decision-making about who gets born to whom. Yearly, the clinic has from 50 to 60 gestational carriers. "The gestational carrier isn't genetically related at all to the life she's carrying," Norbryhn explained. Doesn't that cause the woman's body to reject the baby? I asked. "No," Norbryhn replied. "You would think it would be like an organ donor, but it's not. In women there is a 'maternal blocking anti-body.'

"We just do the medical part of it," she went on. "The amount (of money) that the carrier gets is worked out between them and the couple." Indeed, the whole business end of Huntington Reproductive is kept separate from the clinical, even literally: the administrative office sits across the hall.

Since most insurance plans still don't cover in vitro, 90 percent of the couples pay out of pocket, according to Norbryhn. Costs for one in vitro "cycle" ranges from $4,500 to $10,000. In order to harvest her ova, a woman typically "takes $300 worth of meds a day for about 10 days," she said. "The infertility patients have had to become consumers as well as patients."

No wonder, perhaps, that parents harvest as many ova as they can, fertilize as many as they can, and put the inevitable "spares" into cold storage. Huntington Reproductive charges $150 a year for storage--less than 2 percent of the cost of going through the whole in vitro fertilization cycle again. There is also the physical pain and emotional costs to the woman. "Cycles that use frozen embryos," the CDC website says, "can be considered a 'bonus' because the woman does not have to go through the stimulation and retrieval process again."

From time to time, Huntington Reproductive has served as a matchmaker, taking donated embryos and implanting them in the adopting couples (or singles--about two percent of the women patients at the clinic are single). While the staff feels competent to matchmake medically, it welcomes the input of an adoption agency such as Christian Associates, which is able to deal with issues such as what religious denomination the parents should be. "It's actually a lot more ethical that way," Norbryhn said.

Since 1994, Huntington Reproductive has been a member of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Treatment, to which practically all the in vitro fertilization clinics around the nation belong. This group mandates that its member clinics turn statistics into the Centers for Disease Control, Norbryhn said. The statistics report how many embryos were conceived, how many implanted, how many frozen, and so forth. The embryos, while they can be conceived either in Huntington Reproductive clinic on South Fair Oaks or in the in vitro clinic at nearby Huntington Memorial Hospital, are only stored at the hospital. The liquid nitrogen tanks have to be able to stand an earthquake, Norbryhn said.

Every year her clinic sends out a questionnaire to parents who have embryos in cold storage. They are given the following options: 1) store them for future use; 2) discard them; 3) donate them to another couple; 4) donate them for research. Norbryhn said that about 80 percent of the couples choose the first option, and the clinic is obligated to keep embryos frozen as long as they desire. I asked why a couple would keep "spare embryos," sometimes even after they had their baby.

"A lot of the couples are keeping the embryo," she replied, "because if their child might need a bone marrow transplant or whatever, that embryo might be able to create life that could provide that bone marrow transplant, they can tap into that embryo. A lot of them are just superstitious, and their embryos are part of them. They just can't let go. It's hard to let go--but I've never been in that position."

I asked Norbryhn how many couples say, "donate my embryos to research, and she said less than 5 percent," hastening to add that the research to which they're donated wasn't frivolous or unnecessary. That makes 85 percent. When I asked Norbryhn how many couples put their embryos up for adoption, she said that 15 percent or less donate. This reticent answer left me unable to calculate how many embryos are destroyed yearly.

Although she was helpful and graciously informative on the whole, the same reticence popped up from time to time when Norbryhn was giving me a tour of the clinic facilities. The father is encouraged to participate as much as possible in the in vitro process. So, for example, when Norbryhn showed me the room in which the wife's ova are harvested, she said that often, "the husband is right there coaching just like he would in the delivery room." But when we walked across the hall to the "privacy room," where the HUSBAND'S sperm is...not harvested...sown?...I noticed we didn't look in. "Are there dirty magazines in there," I asked? Yes, Norbryhnn replied, and videos. She wouldn't let me take a photo, though.

Next door to the privacy room is a lab where the semen is stored in liquid nitrogen. "We've had a pregnancy from a gentleman who had his sperm frozen for 17 years," Norbryhn said. It was collected before the onset of a debilitating illness which left him infertile.

Again, I find the same reticence among the endocrinologists who spend their days fertilizing ova with sperm. One, Cuong Tran, is expert in the latest in vitro fertilization technique: taking one particular sperm cell and introducing it directly into an ovum. Since early that morning he has been instrumental in the creation of new human life; no wonder, perhaps, he's too shy to speak.

Norbryhn takes me down the hall plastered with photos of babies in arms, but shies from entering the the room where the embryos of half dozen couples are incubating. We stand at the threshold, looking across the room at a machine. As far as I can see, it contains a petri dish. I ask her if I can go in and look. Norbryhn begs off, saying that this room is Tran's domain, and we need his permission.

I ask her how many embryos are now incubating. Norbryhn said that she doesn't know, but Tran would. When we go back to find him, however, he has left the lab for the day.

NEXT MONTH: Frozen embryo adoption and Catholic bioethical teaching.

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