Caring for all of their children

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, March 14. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

BROWN: Well, coming next on The World and Everything in It: in vitro fertilization.

The Alabama Supreme Court last month decided to consider frozen embryos as children. That put IVF into the national spotlight, and it seemed everyone had an opinion about it.

REICHARD: One family in Montgomery knows those ethical questions intimately. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin talked with them and brings us their story.

JOHN WARD WEISS: We were so worried about the ethical consequences that we had a will created that deemed our embryos our children.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: John Ward and Sarah Peyton Weiss live in Montgomery, Alabama. Three years ago they hired a lawyer to make sure if anything ever happened to them, that their six unborn children would be provided for.

WEISS: We had extreme steps that were taken to ensure that they would be taken care of if something were to happen to us and who would be the executor, how they might be adopted, who would adopt them.

Their story begins in 2020. The couple tried to conceive naturally for a number of years. But Sarah Peyton was worried.

WEISS: She knew something wasn't quite firing on all cylinders.

And she was right. Sarah Peyton and John Ward had reservations about IVF, so they tried several types of fertility treatments. Sarah Peyton even had two surgeries. Nothing worked. So they reluctantly turned to IVF.

WEISS: I tried to see it more as this is helping facilitate, you know, something that our bodies are imperfect and you know, we're trying to facilitate what God intended. And we really kind of ended up there because there just wasn't another option available to us.

Most of us have seen the images of tanks filled with liquid nitrogen—holding canisters of frozen embryos. That’s the second to last stop in a long process. It starts with an egg retrieval. Then the doctor determines how many eggs are mature enough to be fertilized. And even then, not every egg fertilized develops into an embryo.

After months of appointments and thousands of dollars later, the Weisses ended up with 6 embryos.

WEISS: We didn't really know what our landscape looked like until we got to the six embryos. At that point, we knew, okay, you know, we would basically, here's what we know at this point, up until that point, it was just a, who knows what the end result is going to be.

Not every embryo that a doctor transfers actually implants in a woman’s uterus—just like a natural pregnancy. The Weisses’ first transfer resulted in a miscarriage.

WEISS: Once you enter into this, it's just like having a child. There's no turning back. But unlike a child, there's not the immediate reward of a child. You know, this is something that you don't know what that decision and the ramifications of that decision to enter into IVF is going to yield until down the road.

Their second attempt was successful.

AUDIO: [Happy birthday to you!]

Their son, Ward, is now 16-months old.

WEISS: He's learned to say no, but he says it in a really cute way, and it pretty much melts you. He's just a bold-faced, determined individual. And he comes by that honestly.

But for all the joy of this new life, the shadow of what’s next for the four remaining unborn children is never far away.

WEISS: I've always dabbled with whether we're messing with things beyond what we as humans need to be messing with.

Partway through their process, the couple’s fertility clinic merged with another one. That new clinic didn’t recognize the will the Weisses’ lawyer created for their embryos.

WEISS: Their discard policy was quite frankly atrocious. And so much so that we immediately panicked and trucked our embryos to Mobile to another clinic, which was probably one of the most stressful things that Sarah Peyton and I have ever been through.

There are seven IVF clinics in Alabama. The one the Weisses transferred to is the clinic at the epicenter of the current debate—The Center for Reproductive Medicine. The clinic is located on the campus of Mobile’s largest hospital. A patient at that hospital wandered through an unlocked door to the clinic and, once inside, accessed frozen embryos and dropped one of the canisters, destroying the embryos inside. The parents of those embryos sued and that case made its way to the Alabama Supreme Court. The result was the court’s February 16th ruling this year.

WEISS: I remember we were sitting here and something pinged on Sarah Payton's phone and she just kind of had this joyful whoop that came out of the other room. And I was like, what is that? And she goes, they ruled the embryos are children.

The new law means the will they produced years ago to protect their children is less important, but they acknowledge that it has suddenly made a lot of parent’s lives much more complicated than they expected when they signed up for the process.

WEISS: We know another individual that has upwards of 20 frozen. So, you know, what do you do? I mean, up until three weeks ago, you could just say, “Yeah, let's just discard them.”

Forcing clinics and parents to acknowledge the God-given rights the Weisses understood from the beginning isn’t going to be welcomed by all. But John Ward says it is an important step in the right direction to treating embryos ethically.

After the February ruling, about half of the IVF clinics in Alabama immediately paused all transfers. As of this week, all but one clinic has resumed transfers. The one still indefinitely on pause is the Weisses’. The couple knows the delay is going to be hard for people who are currently waiting for a baby.

WEISS: So that is a, it's a kind of like a joy-sorrow, love-hate type relationship, I think that this is at a core, this is a very good thing. I think it's positive, but we have got a long way to go.

Right now, the future of the Weisses’ remaining embryos is uncertain. The couple would eventually like to have more children, but they’re not sure when the clinic will resume transfers. In the meantime, they are encouraged that the debate has once again raised the question of when life begins.

WEISS: What we are trying to do is to put down on paper, black and white, something that God holds the only answer to. And I don't know how lawmakers are going to successfully navigate that answer.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

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