In reply to Bruce Ray.

As someone with a daughter who was born from embryo adoption, I wrestled with this issue for quite awhile, and there is much to be said which cannot likely be addressed in this brief format. What I will say is that every fertility clinic I encountered in our seventeen year effort at family building actively discouraged, or refused to perform, embryo adoptions. Instead, they encouraged us to buy sperm and eggs through their programs and to create embryos. Embryos are not legal to buy or sell, but sperm and eggs are. Ergo, paying for donor gametes is very big business, while adopting embryos undercuts this business.

The fertility clinics who were willing to be involved in the "donation" of embryos required that the laws of anonymous tissue donation be followed. In other words, the donating couple had NO SAY WHATSOEVER in the selection of parents to whom the embryo would be donated, and the receiving couple likewise had NO SAY WHATSOEVER in the characteristics of the embryo they would receive, or access to the donating parents.

This discourages embryo donation in the extreme. Even in adoption, birth parents now choose the family in which they want their child to be raised.
What couple would "donate" their longed-for embryo as if it were a kidney? Instead, it encourages couples to keep their embryos in frozen limbo, paying hundreds of dollars a month in cryopreservation fees, because they cannot figure out what else ethically, emotionally and financially to do.

Because I once did adoption social work, I knew that there were a couple of agencies that helped arrange embryo adoptions between families who could know each other. Children born via embryo adoption could get answers to their questions as they were growing up. Fertility clinics DO NOT INFORM couples about this option, because they want people to pay to hire their egg and sperm donors, and for ongoing cryopreservation of the embryos. Adoption inherently acknowledges the interests and the personhood of the embryo in ways that fertility clinics find very problematic and profit reducing.

People who have created and frozen embryos should be told that they DO NOT HAVE to donate them anonymously or have them given to research to be destroyed. When they feel they have all the children they can parent, they can also privately choose another family who would like to adopt their embryos. This needs to be much more widely discussed in the Christian community, especially BEFORE people begin down an IVF road.

Instead, it was two women who had used an anonymous sperm donor who found us on a website where we listed a profile asking to adopt. It was called "Miracles Waiting" and was much like a dating site. People who value the lives of the embryos they have created and do not want to see them destroyed, but cannot afford to keep them in cryopreservation indefinitely can look for someone else who would appreciate the gift of being able to build a family. Our profile was chosen because of racial/ethnic similarities and our willingness to keep our children in touch with theirs over the years.

When I realized that the people who reached out to us were both women, I was very disappointed. I began composing a 'no thank you' email. My husband stopped me. "Don't write back immediately. We need to pray about this."
Two days later he said, "We need to tell them that we are Christians, and they will probably reject us, but let's don't reject them first." So, we were very honest about our faith and our traditional understanding of marriage.

The next day their email came back. Would we still take our children to a doctor? Uh, yeah! Duh? We discovered that both of them had immigrated from communist countries as teenagers, and HAD NEVER MET a Christian. We also discovered that they had been railroaded into an abortion after an adverse prenatal diagnosis, and were full of grief. They were incredulous that we had carried a baby to term with Trisomy 13, and were very moved when we talked about our decision-making and our faith community.

Seven years later, we see them about once every other summer. They have given us great advice about helping our daughter develop her gifts in math, chess, and music. One of them has come to church with us. We are enormously grateful and we know that God orchestrated so many details of our coming to know each other. He is continuing to move in all our lives.

In years to come, if our daughter ever has a child or grandchild who needs a bone marrow or kidney transplant, she knows where her genetic brothers live, and how to find some of her genetic relatives. My Korean mother-in-law, who said she would never speak to us again if we adopted, has a beautiful granddaughter and is none the wiser. Our biological son and our embryo adopted daughter are super close, and we have hopefully side-stepped the issue of one of them being accepted or preferred over the other.