As ever more couples use IVF and other reproductive technologies to
try to become parents, a growing number of unused frozen embroyos await
their next step: will they be implanted into a woman, with the hope of
becoming a baby? Will they be discarded, perhaps with a religious or
spiritual ceremony, mourned as a lost child? Will they be used for
medical research, in the service of science? Or will they just wait in
the freezer?
According to a new article in the journal Fertility and Sterility, and reported in the New York Times, for the families facing this choice there is a pervasive anguish over the options.
For the couples quoted in the article, the questions about where their
embroyos would end up became just as vexing and emotionally fraught as
any difficult parentin choice, leaving many to just continue paying
monthly storage fees, in some cases for decades.
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