In the Is Sam Brownback an odious liar? thread, the discussion turned to the realities of IVF, and the survival rate of embryos necessary to a successful pregnancy.
Bioethicist Arthur Caplan describes why adopting the surplus is a bad idea, and how advocacy for "snowflake adoptions" [and is it just me, or is the whole "snowflake" name kind of skeevy?] is not only medically unsound, it's ideologically contaminated purely ideological. (emphasis mine)
The clinic chooses to implant the embryos that look the healthiest and asks the couple if they want to freeze the rest. The couple also has the option of having the remaining embryos destroyed, donated to other couples, or donated for embryonic stem-cell research.
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Actually Snowflakes' estimate of 100,000 embryos is probably very low. Most experts think there are as many as 400,000 embryos frozen in storage in the United States. As of just over a year ago, the Snowflakes program had received about 750 of them and had matched 70 donor couples with 48 other couples seeking to have children. Sixteen babies had been born.
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It's great that 16 babies were born last year through the Snowflakes program. That makes it seem as if 16 couples had children who might otherwise have not. But that is not really the case. Nearly all infertility clinics offer couples the option of donating their leftover embryos to other couples. All that Snowflakes has done is brought the rhetoric of adoption into the process.
You might also get the impression that Snowflakes is creating an opportunity for infertile couples to access the 100,000 to 400,000 frozen embryos out there. But that is not really the case either. If you are infertile and are trying to have a baby, your best bet is not to use a frozen embryo made by a couple who had themselves been going through infertility treatment and whose embryos were not used because they did not look healthy enough.
Despite Snowflakes' rhetoric, most frozen embryos are not healthy enough to ever become babies. The chance they will grow to full term is about one in 10 for those frozen less than five years, and even less for those that have been frozen longer. This is why so few couples have taken Snowflakes up on its idea of "adopting" frozen embryos.
Moreover, using terms like "adoption" encourages people to believe that frozen embryos are the equivalent of children. But they are not the same. In fact, infertile couples who want children can frequently make embryos but they cannot make embryos that become fetuses or babies.
The older a woman gets, the less likely her embryos are to become babies. For women over 45, the chance of her embryo becoming a baby is almost zero. The inability to make embryos that become babies is why couples turn to donor eggs or donor sperm. Almost no one who is going to spend $10,000 per try to use IVF is going to want to try it with another infertile couple's frozen embryo whose chances of properly developing grow less with every year it is frozen.
The Bush administration and Congress know all these facts, but have nevertheless poured more than $1 million of taxpayer money into the Snowflakes program and others aimed at facilitating "embryo adoption."
This is a nice way to score points with those who advocate the view that embryos are actual babies and should not be used for research purposes. But it is not the best way to help couples who want to have actual babies.
One million dollars would be far better spent matching fertile couples willing to make embryos with infertile couples, rather than trying to get them to use unhealthy frozen ones.
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But when the money is spent on programs like Snowflakes, the only explanation is ideology not medicine.
Via No Blood for Hubris.
UPDATE: A fantastic three part post at the Mahablog: Part I, Part II, Part III.
Posted by binky at July 22, 2006 03:50 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Crunchy Nutbars | Extremism | Health | Religion | Reproductive Autonomy | Science