USA Today highlights embryo donation as a growing option for family building in their Jan article titled Couples give up frozen embryos for ‘adoption’. They highlighted the Henderson family whose religious beliefs led them to donate their 11 unused embryos to the Gassman family who like them struggled with infertility. There is increasing interest in Embryo Donation (or embryo adoption as some circles refers to it) as a family building method. It offers a cheaper price tag (running half the cost of IVF with donor egg) with higher success rates than traditional IVF.
When a judge terminates the rights and obligations of a biological parent with that parent’s consent, the term is relinquishment. When biological parent is just absent and unaccounted for and unidentified without going to court and they’re not dead, the term used is abandonment. It’s very hard to understand why society does not want to view these people as being abandoned by their biological parents just because it was agreed to prior to their birth in order to avoid having to go to court.
The article describes the situation as win/win but completely overlooks that a person’s biological parents made a decision not to raise them when they are very likely raising their full or half siblings. This was an extra and unused person who they thought would bring joy to some childless couple, but they had to reject their own child as a member of their family in order to bring joy to a couple of total strangers.
I’ve heard people say that it’s great because it gives a person a chance at life. The chance at life is not the problem, the rejection by their bio parents is the problem and the lack of responsibility taken by them is a problem. The other people are not giving the child a chance at life the biological parents are doing that part and the other couple is just going to raise them, adopt them.
What happened to the idea of practicing safe sex and family planning when you don’t want to raise anymore kids so that all the kids born are hopefully wanted by their bio parents? What happened to it being a sad tragedy when people had offspring they did not want? At what point did it become hip to make a few extra kids so other people would have the chance to raise some? It is very irresponsible and cold to have a mistake baby on purpose.
I’m sure the kid will have a great life but he is not getting what he deserves from his own bio parents and that’s sad. Twisted they think it’s heroic or compassionate to walk away from their own kid. I think people do this embryo donation stuff much more if they are not their own offspring but the children of somebody else who was a donor
Marilyn, people are not making extra embryos because they want to donate them. They are making extra embryos because they have no way of knowing how many embryos it will take to create their family.