A friend in the bloggy community sent me this article, about the baby born recently whose embryo was frozen 30 years ago. I'd seen it in my feed, but didn't click until she sent it to me. She sent it to me because the article mentions Snowflakes, the embryo adoption program through Nightlight Christian Adoptions, and I have a history with them.
When we had embryos in storage, and knew we weren't going to use them, we were faced with a choice. I wrote about that in this post on My Path to Mommyhood: Embryo Adoption...Beginning the Process. It was very strange, because we were simultaneously waiting in adoption to become adoptive parents of an infant (you know how that turned out) AND placing our embryos with prospective adoptive parents.
We hadn't chosen a Christian adoption agency because...we aren't Christian. So why, when we had a choice of what to do with our frozen embryos, did we choose the Snowflakes program through Nightlight Christian Adoptions?
Well, because the ideology, while not ours, supports giving embryos chances to become babies. Even those that are a long shot, like our 6 2PNs from the donor egg cycle (still not sure why they were frozen at that early stage) and the 2 blastocysts from the donor sperm cycle. Those embryos were tricky for multiple reasons:
1. They were each half donor material, and not the same half in both cases
2. The 2PNs were frozen wicked early and there was no guarantee that they'd survive thawing (Spoiler alert: they didn't)
3. Unlike what it says on the website link above, we were not successful in our treatments and dealing with extra embryos after having successful pregnancies. Neither of the cycles these embryos came from resulted in a pregnancy or birth.
But, like a 30 year old embryo that was frozen using very old technology, Snowflakes believes that every embryo deserves a shot, and they have a program for "hard to place" embryos. Which I'm sure ours were.
Despite our heathen status, Snowflakes was delightful to work with. There was zero judgment on our spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. We stated that we wanted our embryos to be available to LGBTQ+ recipients and/or single recipients, and religion was not a factor. They said they do occasionally have people seeking embryo adoption who fit those categories (but I bet it was a very small number).
We were successfully matched with a couple in the Midwest, who seemed delightful and had a very nice profile book. Yup, we were reviewing profile books while our own profile book was getting very little traction. I don't remember their book mentioning religion at all, which is usually a bit of a tell (most religious couples mention their faith in their books pretty prominently).
I'm pretty sure our lack of mentioning religion or church or prayer hurt us in our own adoption journey. Adoption seems to be a pretty religion-heavy process, even if you don't have an agency rooted in faith. Not hard to see, given that in the article above, the woman who donated the embryos said "[her] preference was for a married Caucasian, Christian couple living in the US. 'I didn’t want them to go out of the country,' [she said]. 'And being Christian is very important to me, because I am.'”
I really loved working with Snowflakes and didn't feel othered at all for not being in the fold.
What sucked was that eventually, all of the embryos crapped out. The 2PNs didn't survive thawing. The blasts thawed, but only one survived, and it resulted in a negative pregnancy test. We were so very sad, mostly for the couple who had taken a chance on very, very long shot embryos (we were so super transparent that our journey was a clusterfuck), but also for us. Had they been successful, we would have gotten updates, we would have gotten pictures if there was a birth, and we would have possibly been able to meet someone else's baby with my genetics. Which would have been real weird, but also, in a way, amazing. Especially because by the time that news came, it was September 2017 and our own journey to become parents had come to an end.
It also gave us an answer in a sense to whether or not a gestational carrier would have made a difference. Which was, in a way, also very sad -- there wasn't a piece of us that could have worked.
It was interesting that in the article, they mention that many clinics don't take adopted embryos for transfer, particularly the hard-to-place ones. The couple we matched with had to travel over several states to get to their clinic, which I only recently realized was probably not because there wasn't a fertility clinic in their metropolitan area, but there wasn't one willing to do the transfer. You know the reason... the almighty success rates.
Our doctor that we followed from one clinic to another was very down on embryo adoption as a concept -- he felt that it was a slippery slope and contributed to the "personhood" argument that continues to threaten IVF today. If you regard every embryo, every fertilized egg, as a human baby with rights, then IVF becomes a very risky business. That case where the couples sued the clinic for wrongful death (and then dropped it) over destroyed embryos is one example. But, for us, the choice to engage in embryo adoption made sense.
Not because we are pro-life -- I believe in the right to choose because every situation is individual, it's not my business, and I don't enjoy the policing of women's bodies. And as people who believe in the right to choose, we also chose to try to give these embryos a shot -- not because we saw them as "extrauterine children" as the courts in Alabama decided, but because we saw them as having potential. Additionally, we created them on purpose, with a lot of love and effort, so why not give them a second chance elsewhere?
I mean, couldn't there be secular embryo adoption programs, based on the Second Chance idea? (Per the hospital-based clinics we worked with... um no.)
I am grateful that Snowflakes was inclusive and nonjudgmental. I am grateful that they were behind open adoption practices. And, I am grateful that they were incredibly compassionate to everyone involved when our embryos didn't work for anyone. It was a wild chapter in our journey, that's for sure.