What is embryo adoption anyway?

          Several people have asked us ‘what in the world is embryo adoption?’  Here is a layman’s view on it.

When a person has trouble becoming pregnant they have a few options.  Some decide to pursue a traditional adoption, others enter into fertility treatment.  There are a bunch of steps in the fertility treatment world including hormone treatments, surgery, and the last one is called In Vitro Fertilization.  In this process a woman has many eggs removed and stored, and a male supplies thousands of sperm cells.  The doctors do some ‘science-y’ stuff to get the egg and sperm together in a laboratory environment. I’m pretty sure they don’t just shake it in a test tube, but maybe.  After the egg and sperm meet they are given several days to grow and develop.  After cell division has begun it is referred to as a Blastocyst.  Once the blastocyst has had around five days it is frozen (again very science-y).  It should look like the below picture, notice that there are two different cell types, the edge (trophectoderm= placenta) and the center ones (Inner Cell Mass = baby). 

  Once the woman’s body is in a good state to accept the blastocyst it is implanted into her womb hopefully this results in a pregnancy- without the trouble of having to have sex!  However, sometimes the embryo (the next stage of development) doesn't develop so they use another.  This is why they take several eggs.  Often if a family wants multiple children they will hold the rest of the embryos in the freezer until the family is ready for them.  For a better explanation see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/007279.htm

'See the baby?'  'Yeah, it's cute'

        So if a family has 10 eggs taken and turned into embryos they can expect that a few will fail.  A question arises about what to do with the ‘left over’ ones.  Many families have decided to have those embryos destroyed.  Some families though continue to pay for the storage and upkeep of the embryos and to put them up for adoption.  This is where folks like my wife and I come into the picture.  Basically, we go through the same steps except they don’t take any of our eggs or sperm.  We get in on the process at the point of getting the womb into good shape for these little ones.  This entails lots of hormone therapy for Odessa.  This is not the most pleasant experience at all, but in the end it will be worth it. 

Technically you should say we are doing a blastocyst adoption, but that would be even more confusing, people would think we were adopting a young superhero.

Does this summary of embryo adoption clear things up?  If you have other questions please post them in the comments below.