Reckoning with a reality

More than 95,000 babies were born using IVF in 2023, up by 10,000 since 2021. With the Trump Administration backing increased access to lower-cost IVF treatments, the number will continue to rise, but at a steep loss of life. More than 1.5 million excess embryos, frozen after successful rounds of IVF, sit inside cryo tanks nationwide, awaiting an unlikely chance at survival. Since clinics and storage facilities aren’t required to report their numbers, the true count is likely even higher. 

IVF is a scientific achievement, for sure. But for Christians, the moral and ethical implications of creating and storing excess embryos are too important to ignore. Faced with the ethical challenges of IVF, many see embryo adoption as a life-affirming solution to the question of what to do with leftover embryos. Embryo adoption may be a redemptive option after the fact, but it shouldn’t be used to justify creating excess embryos in the first place.

In the late 1990s, the first embryo adoption took place, allowing a woman unable to produce a child to adopt an un-biologically related embryo, implant it into her womb, and bear it as her own. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but today, nearly 2,500 transfers using adopted embryos are performed each year in the United States. 

Few are educated on the implications of IVF once a successful pregnancy or two is achieved, and the goal of a family creation is accomplished. The dark side of reproductive technology is hidden in conversations with IVF clinics, whose sole focus is a live, healthy birth. In this transactional model, conception is just a step toward the real “product”—which means manufacturing excess embryos and discarding the weakest in favor of those most likely to succeed.

At the outset, these future lives are only theoretical, which makes it hard for would-be parents to comprehend the ethical gravity of bringing them into existence. IVF clinics won’t tell you how it feels to give away your own biological children. They won’t help you imagine the real people your embryos will become—individuals who will grow up disconnected from their biological families and imprinted with the primal wound of that separation. These are people who will wonder who they are, what their parents look like, if they have siblings and what characteristics they may share with biological relatives. 

It’s no different than a newborn adopted at birth, and they will yearn for that biological connection. Blood may not necessarily “make” a family, but it does comprise a person, their genetics and personal history—something they deserve to know about and be a part of. 

Adoption complications are present for all—whether adopted as embryos, toddlers, or teenagers. These individuals will likely face identity and attachment issues, higher rates of anxiety and psychological and emotional wounds, if their parents “abandoned” them. Embryo adoption, for all its redemption, still puts a child in a vulnerable position. IVF should never be pursued with the intention of embryo adoption as an end result. 

Parents don’t want the devastation of this positioning either. They will look at their born children, knowing they were once on ice beside the others, their biological siblings. And yet, maybe a woman’s body can’t bear another child, or there are so many embryos, she can’t have them all. Now, families must mourn children not lost to death, but to a future they will no longer share. The spiritual, moral, and emotional cost of creating life outside God’s design has come to this. 

The biological family will then need to pick a new family for their unborn children, hoping and praying that someone else will care for them just as well. They must reckon with the reality that one day, they may meet a boy that looks like them but is a stranger. They’ll need to explain why he wasn’t chosen. They’ll be forced to tell their children that they have full siblings who were given away. They have invited a world of heartbreak and brokenness into their lives that they never imagined possible. 

Embryo adoption is a beautiful concept and the only option for so many lives on ice already created. But it’s not a preconceived solution to rely upon when starting IVF in anticipation of having extras. No one wants to give up children for adoption, no matter how complete their family feels. 

Christian couples should not walk into IVF with embryo adoption as part of the “plan.” If IVF is pursued, it should be done with the utmost care, which means creating only the number of embryos one will use. Each embryo is a distinct human life, created by God, and worthy of the same love and protection as any child already born.