What is the fate of leftover frozen embryos?

By Laura Bell

updated 9:52 a.m. ET Aug. 27, 2009

By the time she was in her 40s, Andrea Cinnamond was afraid she'd never be a mother. Then came the day in 2005 her daughter was born through in vitro fertilization, followed two years later by twin sons. Today, Kaitlin, Jack, and Aidan bounce around like Ping-Pong balls through their Boston home. Cinnamond, now 49, and her husband are grateful for their healthy children and the medical science that helped create them. Yet she's haunted by the three embryos that were left over.

Like many women struggling with infertility, Cinnamond was delighted when a laboratory took sperm and egg and provided five chances for a second child after Kaitlin's birth. In many ways, infertility is a numbers game — more embryos created means more tries for success. She was asked in the beginning about the matter of surplus embryos, but how could she think about those she might not want when her thoughts were consumed by the children she longed for?

When the time came to decide about the extras, she says, "I thought I was going to be calm and casual." And she was, until the first bill arrived to keep the embryos frozen. "I was petrified," she says. "There was no practical reason to keep them. I just wasn't ready to make the decision not to keep them." She paid the $600, hoping that her thoughts would crystallize as time passed. This year, she's paying the bill again.

Michelle DeCrane of Austin, TX, has also been paying for embryo storage for two years. She has a 2-year-old daughter — and six frozen embryos. "I would love to have another baby, if I were younger — I'm 40 — and if money was not an object." She finds herself trapped in a mental loop; while she doesn't have the same mind-blowing love for the embryos as she has for her daughter, neither does she consider them anonymous laboratory tissue. And there's another wrinkle: One of the six embryos is biologically hers and her husband's; the other five were created with donor eggs and his sperm. "What do people do?" she asks. "You have all of these embryos in all of these labs. Are people going to keep doing what I'm doing and pay the $40 a month ad infinitum?"

Some will. Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of embryos have accumulated in fertility clinics throughout the country, some awaiting transfer but many literally frozen in time as parents ask themselves questions few among us ever consider with such immediacy: When does life begin? What does "life" mean, anyway? In a recent survey of 58 couples, researchers from the University of California in San Francisco found that 72 percent were undecided about the fate of their stored embryos. In another study last year of more than 1,000 fertility patients from nine clinics, 20 percent of couples who wanted no more children said they planned or expected to keep their embryos frozen indefinitely. Couples have held on to embryos for five years or more, waiting on an epiphany that never comes. Nadya Suleman, the now-famous mother of octuplets, told NBC News that she had all eight of her embryos implanted because she couldn't bear to dispose of any of them.

"When you're pouring your money, your heart, and your soul into creating an embryo and creating a life, the last thing you want to think about is how you're going to dispose of it," says Anne Drapkin Lyerly, M.D., a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University Medical Center. Until the storage fee comes due. At that point, couples generally have to choose among four options:

Donating to other infertile couples
The first thing many parents want, once they've finished forming their own families, is to let another infertile couple have the embryos. "On the face of it, it's one of the most beautiful, altruistic things in the world," says Bill Petok, Ph.D., a Baltimore psychologist who specializes in counseling infertile couples. Yet, he adds, donating your embryos can be an emotionally fraught process, and depending on the state you live in and your clinic, it can be legally complex as well. The process may be as simple as filling out paperwork or as involved as hiring an attorney to navigate a legal labyrinth and locate a recipient family.

Many couples find they can't cope with the unknowns. Will other parents love the siblings of your children as much as you love your own kids? Would you ever stop worrying about them? Would you want to stay in contact with the family? Deborah Bohn, whose children are 6 and 8, knew she wanted to donate her five unused embryos to another couple to give them a chance at birth, but she didn't want to know anything more. "I couldn't take the thought of knowing I had another child," she says. "I knew my heart couldn't handle it. We're all better off not knowing." Though she now lives in Nashville, her embryos were stored in a California clinic, which was set up to handle the donation. She and her husband were able to stipulate basic terms, such as the education level and religion of the parents receiving the donated embryos, and they accomplished the entire transfer just by filling out forms and sending them to their clinic. "It was probably the hardest decision I've ever had to make," Bohn says. "I cried tons." Yet she has no regrets, and today, no sadness.

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Donating to medical research
Stephanie Smith of Odessa, MO, would have liked more children through in vitro, but complications from the birth of her twin girls two years ago left her unable to get pregnant again. She had five embryos left and spent more than a year reconciling her choices with her religious convictions. Those five clusters of cells forced her to think, almost daily, about how she defined life. She considers herself pro-life, so donating to another infertile couple felt natural. The more she and her husband thought about it, however, the more unsettled they became. The questions she had were too big to be left unanswered. She didn't know if she'd ever stop searching crowds for little girls who looked just like hers. "It's a life-altering decision," she says.

They eventually decided to donate the embryos for medical research, as a gesture of gratitude to a system that had given them their dreams. "We were ultimately still giving life, just not for those particular five embryos," she says.

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