Embryo Adoption

WBIR.com November 24, 2003

 

 

Having a baby is a struggle for Lorri Hubbard. "It's a horrible experience. You feel very inadequate." Lorri is almost 40 and is plagued with fertility problems.

"You cry a lot, you laugh at lot, you pray a lot."

She's considered a number of options, including adoption. But now she has settled on a procedure that is hardly mainstream.

Like a lot of women, Hubbard is choosing invitro fertilization, but with a twist. Instead of using an embryo made from her egg and her husband's sperm, the couple will select an embryo from complete strangers to be implanted in her uterus.

It's a lower cost option know as embryo adoption. It has a 25 - 30 percent success rate.

"When a woman carries a child that bond starts automatically. Whether its your child or not, you don't think about it because its growing in your body."

The doctor implanting the embryo is fertility specialist Jeffery Keenan. "If you believe life starts at the moment of conception, all of these embryos are tiny living beings."

Doctor Keenan is hoping Hubbard isn't the only woman considering embryo adoption. He has opened the first clinic in the nation dedicated exclusively to embryo donation and adoption at Baptist Hospital for Women.

He is marketing to patients worldwide. "Seen as a clearinghouse so to speak. We will have a large number of donor embryos and therefore be able to find good matches for couples."

Keenan hopes to accumulate thousands of embryos from across the country. Like a traditional adoption agency, his clinic will provide a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds for parents to choose from.

"We feel the other options of letting them die in cryopreservation, research, or thawing them out and letting them die are not acceptable options."

Lorri and her husband will know the donor's physical traits and a brief medical and genetic history. The Hubbards will undergo counseling, and the donors will sign an agreement giving up their rights to the embryo.

"People ask, even our own family asks, why go that route when you don't know? But (even if) you have a child of your own, you don't know that child's going to be 100 percent perfect."

Embryo adoption has its critics, who caution the same complications that are seen in traditional adoptions, could also occur with the embryos.

Dr. Glenn Graber philosophy professor at the University of Tennessee states, "The parents who give the child up may not want to be confronted by that child later."

If the surgery is successful, Lorri Hubbard isn't sure if she will tell her child where he or she came from. "I would have to weigh the risks and the benefits and see if I wanted to say anything at all about it."

Hubbard is moving forward, beginning hormone therapy to help her chances, she is not second guessing. "When they put that baby in your arms in the delivery room or what ever, you'll know it was worth it."