Whimsical Life

Thinking Ahead

"The issue is, you are dreading that phone call from the couple that says 'We've been out of the country and we've decided we want to use the embryos.... And [when told the material is no more] they say: 'You threw them out? How could you?'
"It is a very difficult area. As clinic directors, we talk about it frequently."
Dr. Carl Laskin, co-medical director, LifeQuest Centre for Reproductive Medicine

Dr. Art Leader, a fertility specialist who operates Ottawa Fertility Centre is not that obviously conflicted. He sees to it that his clinic routinely destroys abandoned embryos. No one has yet come forward to ask where their long-stored embryos are, with the intention of using them. "It is anywhere from disappointing to disgusting that we don't have an ethical framework. Neither level of government really wants to touch this with a 10-foot pole", he laments.

In Dr. Carl Laskin's fertility clinic embryos, frozen in tanks of liquid nitrogen, for which their biological owners pay an upkeep fee of $300 annually to ensure they are kept intact and usable for some future decision leading to a live birth, there are more than one thousand enbryos considered to be abandoned, or "orphaned".

His is not the only fertility practise burdened with the storage of thousands of embryos where the patients from which they have been extracted are no longer approachable; they have simply disappeared, lost contact, become incommunicado, despite the searches undertaken by the clinics. Leaving the clinics with what they consider to be a moral quandary. In effect, an unusable inventory.

The embryos are in no recognizable human form. Each represents a collection of perhaps six cells. A group of cells that cannot be seen with the naked eye. They are meant to be used in IVF treatment. They are created by fertilizing eggs with sperm in a laboratory setting. They represent the potential, if treatment is successful, of resulting in a baby for some hopeful family.

In some instances the fertility practices that store those thousands of abandoned embryos destroy them, but for the most part they are held in indefinite storage for fear of possible legal action.

A bioethicist has proposed those embryos be donated to science, for research purposes. One fertility scientist responded with an anecdotal incident where a clinic disposed of an abandoned embryo for research purposes, and then the patient whom they had been unable to contact suddenly appeared, upset and prepared to launch a legal suit.

More recently clinics have put together consent forms for the purpose of directly addressing at the outset what should happen with surplus embryos that have been forgotten or abandoned. Giving patients the choice of instructing that they be destroyed, donated to other couples, or used for research purposes. But even armed with such a legal document, the situation is seen as a quandary for some.

"What we spend all our time doing is creating embryos for people to help them have babies. It would be pretty difficult to have to allow them to perish", said Simon Philips, laboratory director at Montreal's Ovo Clinic.  In some instances patients feel a connection those tiny cells having the potential to become live births carrying their DNA.

On the other hand, there are countless others who appear oblivious to the situation, prepared to forget they ever made any such arrangements. They could be used for stem-cell research. A former research fellow with Dalhousie University's Novel Tech Ethics unit feels there is nothing legally or morally preventing clinics from ensuring that abandoned embryos are usefully deployed in this way.

"Insofar as we expressly discard these abandoned embryos, we are wasting a valuable scientific and clinic resource", Ryan Tonken insists. "It's a significant problem and it's a growing one... and we really don't have anything in place to deal with it."

In the future the situation will only become more visible and increasingly exacerbated, given the steady rise in IVF treatments. And with that steady rise will come a matching rise in stored embryos, many of which will eventually be abandoned. So, then, it's time that 'we' get 'something in place', obviously -- and be prepared to deal with this vexing social-cultural-medical problem.