Today’s post is the final in a series devoted to egg freezing. Oocyte cryopreservation or egg freezing is utilized for three main reasons: medical indications, elective freezing and ethical indications.
This week we will focus our discussion on the ethical indications for egg freezing. Intended parents planning on IVF who object, either for religious or ethical reasons, to freeze their embryos have an option to freeze eggs. In these cases, patients can fertilize only as many eggs as will be utilized in the IVF process, and then freeze any remaining unfertilized eggs to avoid a surplus of frozen embryos.
IVF parents who have completed their families often struggle with the decision of how to dispose of their unused embryos. Currently; they have four choices:
- donate the embryos to another couple
- donate the embryos to research
- distroy the embryos
- keep the embryos frozen indefinitely.
The American Fertility Association has an informative paper called The Frozen Embryo Dilemma: A Matter of Privacy, Responsibility and Choice about the topic of surplus embryos. Please share with us your thoughts on this subject.
2 Comments
Thank you for sharing the link to The Frozen Embryo Dilemma!
awesome article.