Read the following article:The Americans who 'adopt' other p...

Read the following article:

The Americans who 'adopt' other people's embryos

When Jennifer and Aaron Wilson found they could not get pregnant, they knew exactly what they wanted to do.

The couple from North Carolina had the choice of starting in vitro fertilisation (IVF), in which mature eggs are fertilised with sperm in a laboratory. Or they could have tried to adopt a child already in need of a home.

Instead they applied to a specialist Christian fertility clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee - the National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC) - which promised to help them "adopt" an embryo.

Doctors often create extra embryos when a couple undergoes IVF, in case multiple rounds of treatment are needed. But this can leave many left over. More than 600,000 are currently being held in frozen storage in the US, most of them waiting to be used by the couple that created them the next time they want to try to have a child. But not all of these embryos are needed, and it is estimated that one in 10 are available for embryo donation.

For many couples who have had IVF treatment, what happens to those no-longer-needed frozen embryos is a question that requires careful consideration - should the embryos be kept indefinitely in cryo-preservation or discarded? If the couple believes human life starts at conception, this can be an urgent moral dilemma.

A similar dilemma confronts pro-life couples seeking fertility treatment. Should they opt for IVF, and add to the ranks of frozen embryos preserved in liquid nitrogen? Or should they instead "adopt" a frozen embryo from a donor?

Some families have different arrangements, then: After undergoing IVF, Andy and Shannon Weber from Alabama had two children, now aged eight and five, and wanted to donate their leftover embryos.

"Our belief is that life begins at conception and the little embryos, they are human life, not just a couple of cells put together. We definitely couldn't destroy them or let them sit there in cryo-preservation forever," says Andy.

But he and his wife were also keen that they should go to a "good, solid Christian" family.

"We wanted a married couple - a man and a woman. We didn't really want a single parent or any sort of alternative lifestyle," says Andy.

"By no means did we care about race or ethnicity. We just wanted the embryos to go to a good home."

Unlike in the UK where equality laws mean clinics have to treat all patients equally, centres in the US can help donors select parents for their embryos based on criteria such as race, sexuality and religion.

Adapted from: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36450328

Reading the news report we can say that:

(i) Couples who struggle to conceive a child are sometimes given the option of using a donated embryo.

(ii) In the UK this is commonly referred to as "embryo adoption", particularly at Christian clinics, where it is regarded as losing a life –

(iii) and where the future parents may have to be married and heterosexual to be eligible for treatment.