Help for infertile couples

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When battlefield carnage during World War I took the lives of their men, Great Britain found itself with 1.7 million surplus women. Nearly all of them were condemned to spinsterhood or widowhood, deprived of both marriage and children.Today in Britain and elsewhere, many married women still encounter difficulties conceiving a child and bringing it to term. After years of trying to conceive, some turn to in vitro fertilization if they can afford the cost and regimen required. But most childless couples can ill afford the expense of a procedure that, at best, offers them only a chance at having a family.Britons were recently shocked to learn that, of the 2.1 million embryos created through IVF in the past 14 years, more than half were destroyed rather than implanted in the intended mother. Had they been used by other couples who want children, the population of the United Kingdom would be 1.2 million greater today.Rest assured, this is not an issue that divides pro-life and pro-choice advocates. The problem is that IVF produces a surplus of embryos in order to improve the chances of a couple producing, at most, one child. Few prospective parents are sanguine about welcoming quintuplets or sextuplets. Strictly speaking, however, the embryos are the parents' property, and they typically leave it to the doctors' judgment to dispense with those that are not needed by the couple. Most are destroyed within days of fertilization, while others may be frozen for up to 10 years.Embryo donation is legal in Britain, but rare. Network UK, a charity for infertile couples, would like it to be encouraged. "Embryo donation is a much bigger thing in America," a spokesman acknowledges. "It is like adoption. It would be a good thing to explore further."However, the Donor Conception Network, which represents parents with children born from donated embryos, sperm, and eggs, believes that donor parents ought to be able to meet and approve of adoptive parents. This is already the rule in New Zealand.For the past decade there has been such a program available in the United States that aims at "helping some of the more than 400,000 frozen embryos realize their purpose -- life -- while sharing the hope of a child with an infertile couple."It is called the Snowflakes program (www.nightlight.org). In the past 10 years it has led to the birth of 157 babies. And, yes, the couple who created the embryo is allowed to meet the prospective adoptive parents. Although sponsored by Christians, the program is not limited to Christian couples.Doctors occasionally use as many as 40 eggs in some treatments, all of which are fertilized, then assessed for viability. Typically, they consider only about one in five to be strong enough for implantation.Snowflakes, based in Los Angeles, acknowledges that some embryos not judged by doctors to be viable, have still produced healthy babies.A new edition of David Yount's "Growing in Faith: A Guide for the Reluctant Christian," is published by Seabury this month. He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount(at)erols.com.