Family Planning & the Gift of Life

You know that feeling, when you both decide you’re finally done having kids? That weight off your shoulders, its a bitter-sweet feeling. My husband and I made that final decision a few months ago. We have twin boys that are 2.5 years old. I always pictured us with two boys, and here we are… we have our two perfect, active little boys. Our family is complete and we are content not having any more children. With that decision finally made, we began the big baby-stuff purge! However, our purge wasn’t your average garage sale or goodwill donation type of purge. Along with the pack-n-plays, jump-a-roos, and boxes of baby clothes, we also had to figure out what we were going to do with our 3 frozen embryos.

Our journey to parenthood wasn’t an easy one. We weren’t one of those couples that blinked and got pregnant, were were part of the 10% that struggled with infertility. After two frustrating years of trying to get pregnant and 4 IUI attempts, we decided to bite the bullet and head straight to IVF (In Vitro Fertilization). We worked with the wonderful doctors at Wisconsin Fertility Institute and they set us up with an aggressive IVF plan. Given our medical history, they gave us really good odds for conception using IVF, which was very encouraging!

Our IVF month went about as smoothly as you could ask for. We had 12 eggs retrieved, and 9 fertilized. Each day the nurse would call and give me a report on how our embryos were doing. The goal was to have at least 2 grade A embryos by the 5th day, so that we could have them transferred back into my cozy uterus. That was a very emotional week. We had one devastating call from the nurse the day before our transfer, telling us we lost 4 embryos overnight. I was crushed, I felt like I lost 4 potential children that day. We prayed that the remaining embryos would make it one more day. So we could transfer at least two and have several to freeze as our “back-ups” in case this cycle didn’t result in a pregnancy. During that week, I got so emotionally attached to those tiny little embryos. I truly believed our future children were sitting in those petri dishes at our clinic laboratory. I loved each of them so much already.  

We made it to our transfer day and had 5 fantastic grade-A blastocyst embryos. Two of those were transferred back into my uterus – and the remaining 3 were sent to the freezer. Ten days later the rest was history. We found out we were indeed pregnant and a few weeks later we found out it was twins! It was the best outcome we could have ever asked for and are truly blessed to have IVF work for us the very first time.

Fast forward three years, and it was time to make the very difficult decision about what to do with our 3 remaining embryos. There were basically three options for us: 1) Destroy them  2) Donate them to science research  3) Donate them to another couple struggling with infertility. For us personally, my husband and I knew we didn’t want to just destroy our embryos. He was leaning towards donating to science research and I was leaning towards donating to another couple. We spent a lot of time discussing each option, weighing pros and cons, and even consulting with our closest friends for guidance. We spent several more weeks researching which option was best for us. It was one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever had to make as a couple. There isn’t much information online about this topic and our clinic didn’t provide any help or guidance. We have never known anyone else that had to make this difficult decision before.

Ultimately, it hit me one night laying in bed, there was only one option that I knew I could live with forever and feel really good about. I was completely at peace knowing that this was the best option for us. I just had to convince my husband… so I pleaded my case and we both agreed. We decided to donate our 3 frozen embryos to another couple going through infertility.

Ok, now what? There was the option to donate them to another couple that were patients at our fertility clinic, but neither of us felt comfortable with it being so local. I couldn’t get past the idea of having potential biological children being raised in our local area and possibly going to school with our boys. No, we felt much more comfortable donating to a national agency. There were a few agencies that I found during my research, but we chose to go with the National Embryo Donation Center.

The National Embryo Donation Center works similar to an adoption agency. There are two types of donations, open or closed. We chose a closed donation, which means we would not have any contact with the other family that decides to adopt our embryos. In our eyes, our donation was possibly one of the biggests gifts we could ever give to someone. The chance at parenthood. We love our boys so much and they amaze us every day. We are so blessed to have them in our lives, and we wanted to give that chance to another family. But we knew we didn’t want to know the actual outcome of our donation. Once a family selects our embryos, there is a 50% chance that a pregnancy will actually occur. Our donation is one of hope – hope for the chance at life for our 3 little embryos and hope for bringing joy to others.

The donation registration process itself was very long and extensive. We both had to fill out lengthy medical history forms, paper work and personal questionnaires that covered topics from our physical characteristics like hair/eye color to hobbies and favorite type of music. Then there was additional blood work screening that we needed to have done. We had the option to include photos of our boys to go in the file with our embryos, which we decided to include (and of course I made sure to pick the cutest photos!) In the end it probably took about 3 months for the whole process to be completed.

Then, today I finally heard the words I’ve been waiting to hear, words that surprisingly hit me at my core and brought tears to my eyes… “Your donated embryos have arrived safely”. Our embryos are no longer ours, they are now ready to be adopted by another loving family and given the chance at life that we were not able to give them.  

{The beliefs and decisions in this post are personal. Others going through this process have the right to decide which option is the best fit for them. For more information on Embryo Donation visit the National Embryo Donation Center or Embryo Adoption Awareness Center.}