Supporters of the nation’s first embryo adoption bill, which passed the Georgia Legislature this month, say the legislation provides an important legal safeguard for parents who have received embryos donated from other couples.
But for others, the bill represents a controversial move toward classifying embryos as children.
“Everybody wants to try to read something into this,” said State Rep. James Mills, R-Gainesville, one of the bill’s sponsors. But the bill does not broach the question of whether an embryo is a child, he said.
“It really is what it says it is — it’s the option of adoption for those parents who wish to remove the possible litigation of having to fight for their child that they carried full term,” he said. “The personhood battle remains to be debated.”
The bill, dubbed the “Option for Adoption Act,” would be the first to offer residents the option of getting court approval for their embryo adoption.
The legislation changes little about the outcome or procedure of embryo adoption, fertility clinic operators say. However, the legislation officially brings the language and legal protections of adoption law to embryos, which now falls under property law in most cases.
Staff Photo by Tim Barber Matt Parker, left, Hannah Parker, 6, and Wendi Parker sit at their kitchen table in Harrison, Tenn. The Parkers are expecting a new baby, but this time is will come from a frozen embryo.
Lawmakers from North Georgia’s legislative delegation voted for the embryo adoption bill, HB 388. The bill now is awaiting consideration by Gov. Sonny Perdue. Bert Brantley, a spokesman for Gov. Perdue, wouldn’t comment on pending legislation and noted the governor has a 40-day bill review period after the legislative session, which ended April 3.
A bill in the Tennessee General Assembly would give added legal adoption protection to adoptive parents of embryos, but it would not require court approval to officially recognize the embryo exchange as an adoption, said that bill’s Senate sponsor, Sen. Diane Black, R-Gallatin.
Sen. Black said the Tennessee bill will not be addressed in this legislative session to allow time to gather feedback from a number of stakeholders this summer.
In the United States, about 4,000 embryo adoptions have taken place since the 1980s, according to estimates from the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville. The estimate includes embryo donations coordinated with little fanfare through fertility clinics. But it also includes “adoption model” exchanges carried out more recently through adoption agencies that have extended their reach into the realm of embryos, conducting home visits and counseling parents on their decision, said researcher Dr. Reginald Finger with the National Embryo Donation Center.
Although parents donating embryos relinquish any legal rights to their embryos through a legal contract, the new law would provide the “extra safeguard” of court-approved adoption option, giving donor parents no legal recourse to try to lay claim to the child, said Dr. Finger.
“If embryo adoption changes from hundreds (completed) per year to thousands per year, it won’t be long until one of these cases is going to turn out to be a legal nightmare for somebody,” he said.
Fertility experts, bioethicists, religious groups and adoptive parents agree that connecting embryo donation to an adoption model raises ethical and political issues, including the lightning-rod question of whether embryos are children.
“The ideological point is, if you talk about adopting an embryo, you are playing to the notion that just like we adopt children, we adopt embryos. It’s sort of a back door to the embryo-is-a-person argument,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
“TWILIGHT ZONE”
At first, the idea of embryo adoption sounded more like science fiction than reality to Wendi Parker of Harrison, Tenn.
“It kind of seemed like the Twilight Zone at the time, that someone would put somebody else’s baby inside of me. That actually seemed too bizarre for words,” said Mrs. Parker, 36, who first heard about embryo adoption in 2006.
But today Mrs. Parker is 25 weeks pregnant with another couple’s embryo that was fertilized years ago in a laboratory dish and frozen in cryopreservation storage.
That embryo was one of many donated to the Parkers by an Ohio couple who had extras left over after completing their own in vitro fertilization. The Parkers long had considered traditional adoption after their first biological child was born and Mr. Parker’s subsequent vasectomy. Embryo adoption gave her a second chance at pregnancy while saving an embryo, she said.
“This child is going to get to live and have a life and would not normally have had this opportunity,” she said. “I feel like the Lord gave me a second chance to be a mom.”
To classify the exchange of embryos as an adoption has implications for the debates on abortion and stem-cell research as well as the morality of creating excess embryos through the in vitro fertilization process, said Dr. Rink Murray, reproductive endocrinologist with Tennessee Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic in Chattanooga.
“Moving embryos out of property law into adoption law is a very subtle way of getting people to regard these as more like children,” Dr. Murray said.
That is the implication, admitted Rep. Mills, though he emphasized that the bill does not define an embryo as a human.
“I make no bones about the fact that I am pro-life, but this bill does not get into the issue of pro-life or pro-choice. It’s pro-adoption,” Rep. Mills said.
At the same time, he acknowledged that “the strong implication is, you don’t adopt tables and chairs. You adopt a living human being.”
VENTURING INTO EMBRYO ADOPTIONS
Though couples who have undergone in vitro fertilization have opted to donate their embryos to other couples since the 1980s, the term “embryo adoption” became widely publicized in 1997 with the launch of the Snowflakes embryo adoption program.
Bethany Christian Services of Greater Chattanooga, an adoption and family service agency, began connecting couples who wish to transfer embryos in 2006, said Director Peggy Lowe.
Tennessee Reproductive Medicine has partnered with Bethany to facilitate embryo transfers.
The exchange of embryos is treated like a traditional adoption, despite being handled technically under property law in the state of Tennessee, Dr. Murray said.
Donating embryos is “not an easy thing to do,” Dr. Murray said. “It is giving up a potential child to a stranger. It’s nice to have adoption-level protections” through Bethany.
Most embryo adoptions facilitated by fertility clinics don’t involve a home study or may not involve as much communication between the couples involved, he said.
