By Alisha Fernandez Miranda
It was 2011. I was living in London. Obama was President. The dance floor was alive with Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” It was entirely acceptable, even encouraged, to wear skinny jeans. And it was also the year I froze my embryos.
Even though I was one of the lucky few that only needed one cycle of IVF to conceive, my path to pregnancy was littered with heartache and disappointment. If you’ve been through assisted conception, I don’t need to explain this because you already know.
Eventually, I got my happy ending: healthy twins and five good quality embryos, made from my top quality 29-year-old eggs, grown to the blastocyst stage and screened using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).
When my kids were four, my husband and I briefly considered having another child. We got a dog instead, which suited us just fine. Since then, I rarely think of those frozen embryos or what to do with them, save for once a year when I get a storage bill for £390/$505 (roughly half, I’ve been told, of what American families pay for the same service).
Each March when the reminder email hits my inbox, I spend a few days in contemplation. We are sure we don’t want any more children, which means our options are to (1) donate the embryos to another family (2) destroy them or (3) offer them up for research. To date, my choice every year has been (4): do nothing.
I’m not alone. No one knows how many embryos are being kept frozen around the world. In the US, estimates range from 400,000 to one million. In the U.K., they number around 500,000. Studies have shown that most people with frozen embryos are like me: indecisive.
This year, I decided it was time to actually explore my options. The law in the U.K. changed in 2022 to increase the maximum limit for embryo storage to 55 years. While inertia until the year 2066 sounded appealing, the idea of having to write a provision into my will of who was going to be responsible for my embryos after I died did not.
I approached the question of what to do with gusto and in my usual data-driven, spreadsheet-organized way. I wasn’t surprised to find a slew of politically and religiously motivated information, fraught with sometimes dubious “facts.” What I wanted, though, was guidance on a decision that should be, like any to do with my own body, down to family planning and personal choice.
As I set out to explore my options, there was one I was able to rule out almost immediately: donating my embryos to another family who would implant them, carry them to term, and raise them. Nonprofits exist, many of them religious, to facilitate what they call “embryo adoption.” These “snowflake babies” made national news in 2005 when George Bush invited 21 of them to the White House to demonstrate his opposition to stem cell research.
While I don’t believe that life begins at conception, I do know many loving families, including many same-sex couples, who have benefitted from egg donation. But even with that consideration in mind, donation was just not for me. Maybe it’s selfish, but I couldn’t imagine a world where my biological child existed without me as its parent.
The second option, destroy them, was the simplest route but also felt weirdly emotional. It’s not because I’m necessarily attached to my embryos; but, even after almost 15 years, it’s easy to access the feelings of intense effort involved in the IVF process. I remember the daily injections, the horrible bloating, the nurse wishing me good luck just as my embryos were implanted, then lying on my sofa for 24 hours with hopes that my supine position would somehow make the whole process more likely to work. There was, quite literally, blood, sweat, and tears at each stage of the journey. And lots of money. I wasn’t prepared to cast that aside if there was still a chance my embryos could be used for something positive.
The third option, donating my embryos for research, was appealing but required delving into the depths of bio-genetics to understand. I still don’t quite understand it. I had an idea in my head, possibly from watching too much Star Trek with my husband, that my embryos could be useful as a sort of genetic insurance policy. Embryonic cells are pluripotent, which means they can eventually develop into multiple types of cells. In a fetus, the same cluster of initial cells go on to build all the organs, which makes them incredibly versatile. Researchers believe that embryonic stem cells could treat diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes.”
So far though, the practical applications of this research — for example, using the cells from my own frozen embryos to create stem cell lines that could grow a spare kidney for my children if they needed — are limited. I found one case of a woman who, in 2003, had her frozen embryos implanted in her sister’s womb, in order to carry a child that would be a bone marrow transfer match for her own daughter, also conceived via IVF, who was sick with aplastic anemia. The baby born was a match, but in the end, the transplant was never required. I couldn’t find any further studies on the subject and didn’t receive answers to my requests from the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority or the UK Stem Cell Bank. Still, I remain fascinated by the science behind this, even though it still seems like a futuristic fantasy.
Fundamentally, even having a choice feels like a privilege. In the course of making my decision, I spoke to several women, particularly in the U.S., who are rushing to destroy their embryos for fear of what might happen without their consent. The current administration’s demonstrated hostility to reproductive choice, plus rulings like in Alabama’s 2024 Supreme Court case that declared embryos have the same rights as children, mean that friends of mine like Savannah, 42, aren’t taking any chances. After having three children via IVF (her youngest is nine), she recently decided to destroy her remaining embryos. “We kind of forgot about them because the payment was on autopay,” she told me. “But now I feel an urgency. I wouldn’t want that option to be taken away from us.” Lauren, 43, had a similar experience. The election, she said, “was the push we needed to finally make a decision.” Last week, she signed the paperwork to discard the embryo she froze after undergoing IVF six years ago.
Ultimately, as these decisions should be, our choice ended up being a personal one. My husband and I are donating our embryos for research. Even if they don’t end up being used to grow stem cells, donated embryos are vital to train the doctors and lab technicians that perform the treatments we were so fortunate and grateful to benefit from. Without IVF, our family wouldn’t be a family, and this seems like a happy medium between doing something good for others without making a decision that we wouldn’t be comfortable with, like donating for a live birth.
It’s a decision I feel good about — and one that I’m glad I’m able to make while I still have the choice.
1Hoffman DI, Zellman GL, Fair CC, Mayer JF, Zeitz, JG, Gibbons WE, and Turner TG. May 2003. Cryopreserved Embryos in the United States and Their Availability for Research. Fertility and Sterility 79 (5): 1063–1069. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, “Fertility treatment 2022: preliminary trends and figures
2 Preliminary UK statistics for IVF and DI treatment, storage, and donation,” Published: July 2024
3 Zishang Yue & Calum MacKellar (2024) A quantitative analysis of stored frozen surplus embryos in the UK, The New Bioethics, 30:3, 173-190, DOI:10.1080/20502877.2024.2354979
4 Hoffman DI, Zellman GL, Fair CC, Mayer JF, Zeitz, JG, Gibbons WE, and Turner TG. May 2003. Cryopreserved Embryos in the United States and Their Availability for Research. Fertility and Sterility 79 (5).
5 Lowell T. Ku, Nanette Elster, Steven T. Nakajima, “Frozen embryos: a life-saving option,: Fertility and Sterility, Volume 90, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 849.e15-849.e16.