Adoption is a Beautiful Thing

Do you know where your children are?

DEADLOCKED IN NEW JERSEY wrote in to Dear Abby:

My husband and I have been married 11 years.

So far, so good.

We went through eight years of fertility treatments before having our twins.

Hmmm.

When they were a year old, we discovered I was pregnant with our third child.

Surprise!

We have two embryos left and need to decide what to do. We either use them or destroy them.

Those embryos are human beings. Think about it this way: "We have two toddlers left. Do we raise them, or do we destroy them?" Fortunately, adoption is a more realistic option when it comes to children who are still embryos.

I think we need to give the embryos the chance they were meant to have. However, my husband is concerned only with the financial side of it as we have been living on one salary and things are tight.

Gee, better hope you don't get sick, if your husband puts money ahead of human life.

My heart aches over this.

If only there was some way people having trouble conceiving becoming parents that didn't involve creating more embryos than they were both willing to give a reasonable chance at living.

Do I do what I believe is right and stand by my religious and moral beliefs, and take the chance my husband will resent me for the rest of our marriage?

Guys, think about this. She can go ahead and have those children implanted whether he likes it (or knows about it) or not, and he can be held financially responsible for them. She can adopt them out, and he can still end up financially responsible for them. I say men should not donate sperm and should be very cautious about banking it for themselves, and that applies here as well. He needed to give his sperm (unless they used donor sperm) for this to happen. Which also brings up the point that even if they did use donated sperm (or some creep at the lab decided to secretly use his own sperm) and her husband doesn't want more children, he can still be held financially accountable by a court. All it takes is one judge.

But I digressed. What she is apparently talking about is going ahead and having them implanted over his objections. She should not do that. What she should do is donate them. I was happy to see Dear Abby give information about doing just that:

Your embryos could be donated for embryo adoption by a couple who have been unable to conceive, and who would love to raise them. For more information, you should contact an attorney who specializes in family formation, or contact the Snowflakes Frozen Embryo Adoption and Donation Program. Its phone number is 714-693-5437 and its website is www.nightlight.org.

Thank you, Dear Abby!

Unfortunately, it seems that some people in the fertility/reproductive assistance business want to increase their "success" rates, and so they will create more children than will be given a reasonable chance at life, pick the most promising embryos (discarding or experimenting on the others - killing them either way), implant multiple embryos, and selectively kill any that make it to the fetal stage that might have a medical problem or are the weakest if "too many" of them have made it to that stage. Too many parents don't need much arm twisting to go along with any of that. The result? Innocent human beings are being killed by other human beings, and even those who aren't killed are being treated like commodities.

Ladies, if you spend your twenties and early thirties partying and having sex with bad boys you wouldn't want to be the (financial) father of your children, or you spend that time getting graduate degrees and climbing the corporate ladder... rather than learning what kind of man would make a good husband and dating and then marrying such a man... so that you find yourself marrying in your mid or late thirties, expect that your're going to have trouble conceiving.

I realize it is emotionally easy for me to discourage or be cautious about fertility treatments, IVF, third-party reproduction, etc., since my wife and I conceived the children we wanted to have, without aid, in two months and in three months, and those children have survived. But that it is easy for me to write does not make what I write false or wrong. I value human life. I also appreciate that I was conceived in a loving act of passion rather than in lab equipment and stuck in a freezer. Even if a child was conceived in rape, it is better for an adoptive set of parents to give someone else's biological offspring a good life rather than killing their own biological children in an attempt to have a biological connection to the children they end up raising.