It's Time to Decide What to do With My Unused IVF Embryos

I'm not sure why it threw me when the message arrived by email on a random afternoon in July. “Re: Imminent expiry of storage period of frozen embryos.” It felt like such a message should come on stiff parchment sealed with wax, befitting the gravity of the content. Instead, it arrived in my inbox at the end of the day, as if an administrator had only just remembered to hit “send” before they went home. Deeply unceremonious.

The attached PDF explained that the 10-year storage period my husband and I had agreed to for our frozen embryos was nearly up. We could continue storing our two remaining embryos in their tank of liquid nitrogen on the 11th story of a tower block in London, or we could donate them to research or training. Or, if those options didn’t appeal, we could simply “allow them to perish.” Either way, we had a decision to make. 

I swallowed. I have written enough about the science of reproduction to know that those embryos are little blobs, clusters of cells and nothing more. I have two children whom I love, who came from that batch of embryos, and I have no desire for another. Why did I feel so upset?

Research shows that between 40% and 60% of human embryos never make it as far as birth — some are miscarried, while most fail to implant in the uterine lining and are reabsorbed into the body without anyone knowing of their existence. But it's thought there are 1.2 million unused IVF embryos in the U.S. For someone who has spent a long time trying to conceive and going through IVF, embryos take on a symbolic quality. In the days after egg collection, IVF patients wait anxiously for phone calls from embryologists: How many embryos did we create? How many survived to day three? How many survived to day five? Each lost embryo is mourned.

The survivors are graded according to the speed of their growth and neatness of their cell structure. It's impossible for this process not to feel like a school report card. You got some 6AAs? Good effort. You got a 1DD? Commiserations. Try harder next semester — never mind that each round of IVF will cost you around $20,000. 

For 18 months after my own embryos were created, as my body was scanned and sliced and pumped with hormones until it was suitably receptive to a pregnancy, my embryos were the closest things I had to children. 

I'd walk — or hobble, depending on what had just been done to me — past the tower where they were stored, and puff up with maternal pride. "That's where my babies are," I’d tell my friends, many of whom were mothers of children who didn’t depend on liquid nitrogen to live.  They would give me a sad look. It’s no wonder women going through infertility often adopt cutesy terms for their embryos like “embies” or “frosties” or — this one has always made my toes curl — “embabies.” 

When one of my embryos was finally transferred into my uterus, I marvelled that the sonogram the embryologist used to place the embryo was so detailed I could see it go in. (I discovered later that actually, I couldn't – the comet-like whoosh I saw was actually the liquid the embryos were grown in). In previous centuries, pregnancy wouldn't be confirmed until the “quickening,” when the woman started to feel her baby move — but here I was, watching myself get pregnant. 

And because I had witnessed it, it's not surprising that when the embryo didn’t implant, I sank into a deep grief. I'd made the rookie error of imagining a future for this child: thinking about how I would share the news of my pregnancy, what I would buy for its nursery. I'd even taken an interest in local schools. “A child in mind,” the author Hilary Mantel called this grief. “When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like that short story that wouldn't work after the opening lines,” she wrote in her memoir, “Giving up the Ghost.”

Embryos, as we know them, are a relatively new thing. For a long time, they were just a theory: Aristotle scrutinized chicken yolks to figure out how we develop; Leonardo da Vinci produced detailed (incorrect) sketches of fetuses in the womb; a whole category of ancient scientist, the “preformists,” thought tiny humans were curled up inside sperm. It wasn’t until 1828 that the Estonian scientist Karl Ernst von Baer accurately described the development of embryos.

Fast forward a few centuries and embryologists can now watch the cell clusters of the embryo develop with timelapse photography, biopsy them, and, for enough money, send them to companies that will scrutinize their genetics and speculate on their likelihood of becoming a person who is tall or smart or who might develop cancer. 

There's also lots we don't know. Ethical rules prevent scientists from cultivating embryos beyond 14 days, and since you can't usually see an embryo on a sonogram before six weeks of pregnancy (which, we must remind ourselves, is actually four weeks after conception because pregnancy technically begins at the start of a woman's last period), there's a two-week “black box” when the embryo is developing and scientists still have to guess what's happening. 

“I've been running an embryology course for 30 years,” Professor Joyce Harper told me earlier this year. “The textbooks are called 'human embryology,' and they tell you what happens during every day of development… but we've never actually seen it. It's all extrapolated from chick and mouse embryos.”

Ironically, it was science that changed the religious view of what constitutes the beginning of a life: Only after von Baer's observations were made public did Pope Pius IX clarify in 1869 that pre-"quickening" pregnancies should not be terminated.

Is it because we can see embryos now that the anti-abortion movement has become so attached to them? In the U.S., religious campaigners assert, and an increasing number of states have legislated, that life begins at the moment of conception. Those little blobs, they insist, contain souls — a view which makes an embryo's life equal to the adult woman carrying it. 

This change has had tragic consequences: A recent analysis by ProPublica found that the number of deaths through ectopic pregnancy, a condition that is usually discovered when a baby is still in the embryo stage, have more than doubled because doctors are either hesitating or refusing to terminate these non-viable pregnancies in states where they could face criminal penalties. Meanwhile, in 2024, a court ruling in Alabama caused panic when it appeared to declare that destroying embryos was tantamount to murder. Bad news for people like me who have tough decisions to make about surplus embryos. 

To avoid the moral hazard of destroying embryos, some U.S. clinics facilitate “embryo adoption,” where people donate surplus embryos to those who can't have children (or who want more). Dr. Jeffrey Keenan, the owner of the Tennessee-based National Embryo Donation Center, proudly told me his motivation was "completely a God thing," when I interviewed him in 2023. (His organization puts prospective parents through FBI background checks before they are allowed to “adopt.” The clinic also has a long list of groups that are not permitted to “adopt,” including same-sex couples and single women.)

You don't have to be religious to attach an emotional value to embryos, though. Even those of us who strongly support abortion can't help but feel an attachment; when you've poured time, money, and energy into creating them, their destruction feels like a disappointment. What a let-down to allow something that entered the world with a bang to fizzle.

I've spoken to countless IVF patients who have found nonreligious ways to mark the passing of their "children in mind.” My friend, Alice Rose, got tattoos commemorating each embryo she donated to research; One  embryologist told me she left her unused embryos under a favorite tree, and another friend, Natalie Silverman, threw three roses into the sea, one for each embryo she and her partner discarded. On Etsy, a veritable cottage industry has emerged to honor discarded or lost embryos by encapsulating them in a pendant or memorializing them with a personalized painting.  

Occasionally, a clinic will offer “compassionate transfer,” where an embryo is transferred into a woman's uterus at a point in her cycle where a pregnancy is unlikely to take place. 

The psychotherapist Julia Bueno wrote about this desire to mark the potential for a life in “The Brink of Being,” her book on miscarriage: “It's clear here that neither 'life' nor 'death' in the human experience has to rest upon a consciousness — nor an embodiment of any sort.”

All of this might sound pro-life, but most IVF patients are keenly aware of the difference between embryos and actual babies. As the viral argument goes: An embryo needs a freezer to live, whereas putting a baby in a freezer would kill it.

Still, Bueno wrote that this emotional tension “would not have arisen without the rapidly evolving wonders of reproductive technologies.”  

“It is also testament to the strength of a connection we can make with a child who may or may not even have been a 'technical' — or biological — possibility," she writes. In other words, science is responsible for the confusing predicament IVF patients find themselves in once they have finished creating their families. It's the tension between what is — in my case, two blobs of around 100 cells — and what could have been — two full human lives — that causes my head to spin. 

As for me, four months have passed since I received that fateful email and I still haven't made up my mind. My husband is less tortured by the question. To him, donating to science or research seems like the obvious choice. Perhaps it's because his contribution was less invasive.

For me, donating is the right choice, too, but that doesn’t make it easy. Of course my unused embryos should go toward advancing the future of the very science that created them, but there are other options, too. We could donate the embryos to someone else who wants a child – although, while I would like to help others in my community, I think I would struggle not to consider myself that future child's “mother.”

I still haven't written the email. If I do it — when I do it — it'll feel like an act of brutal finality. Yes, I suppose you could argue that it will represent the end of the potential for life. But what matters to me is that it will represent the end of a host of other, more me-centered things: my reproductive years, the journey I went on to have my children, the chance for me to have one more baby. 

When I finally send it, I don't know how I'll mark that moment. For now, that final act is going to have to wait.