Soon after I became an adoption blogger for Families.com over two years ago, I wrote blogs introducing three kinds of adoption—domestic infant adoption, adoption from the child welfare system, and international adoption. But now there is another kind of adoption: embryo adoption.
“Embryo adoption” or “Embryo donation” is when a couple donates unused embryos that were created and frozen during infertility treatment to another couple. These embryos are transferred to the womb of the recipient mother.
Technically this is not “adoption” at all in most states, since most states agree that the legal mother of a child is the mother who gives birth to it. Therefore, no legal adoption is needed.
(Many states also declare that the only legal father of a child is the husband of the mother who gives birth, but this last point is unclear and in some states, attorneys have said there is the possibility for genetic fathers to be sued for child support.)
Depending on the state, it is most often a transfer or property document that is needed for the donor parents to give the embryos to a specific couple. The donor couple has no further rights to the embryos once that is done.
Some agencies have now formed to link would-be parents with unused embryos. Some of these agencies have anonymous donor pools and offer donors the choice of a closed adoption. The receiving couple will likely know only current medical information of the donors. If the donor couple wishes, they often participate in choosing the family or families who will receive their embryos. Many of these agencies require a homestudy just as adoption agencies do, to investigate the fitness for parenting of the embryo recipients.
Some religious groups have opposed embryo adoption, saying it encourages in vitro fertilization, which they oppose. However, some groups have likened embryo adoption to any other kind of adoption. They say that adopting a child conceived out of wedlock is seldom seen as encouraging premarital sex, so neither should adopting a leftover, already-frozen embryo be considered an encouragement to in vitro fertilization. In fact, many (but not all) of the agencies which handle these kinds of “adoptions” are religious organizations who believe that life begins at fertilization and therefore embryo adoption saves lives.
President Bush invited families of these so-called “snowflake” children to the White House in July 2006 as he vetoed a bill that would have funded research using stem cells from embryos.