The Great Embryo Debate

Its been 40 years since the first successfulIVFbirth. Now an estimated one million embryos are on ice in the U.S., but who gets to decide whetherthese maybe babies are human life, a clump of cells, or something in between?

- Elissa Strauss

IT TOOK LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES TO PLACE THE embryo in my uterus. Wearing a paper gown and cap, I was led by a nurse to a surgical suite, where I placed my legs in stirrups. I assumed the position, and a second nurse confirmed my identity while someone else inserted a catheter through my cervix. Then a doctor—and this is the term he used—squirted a roughly 0.1-millimeter bundle of cells into me.

After six months of infertility treatment, I was prepared to have some emotional reaction, but it felt more like I was being prepared for a covert science experiment than a much-hoped-for pregnancy. Then came the photo.

As I was wheeled out of the operating room, someone handed me a heavily magnified shot of the embryo printed on glossy paper. I let out the kind of unruly laugh that has no place in a hospital. The seriousness of the moment had been punctured by the arrival of what felt like a souvenir, the kind shilled by amusement parks after a ride on their tallest roller coaster.

Visually, it wasn’t much to see: a gray, scaly moon blown up to the size of an Oreo. Still, it was my Oreo moon. I put the picture in the corner of my bedroom mirror and gazed at it while my husband gave me the nightly progesterone shot to help my “maybe baby” survive the precious days after in vitro fertilization. A few weeks later, after I miscarried, I tucked the photo in a drawer where I knew it would get lost but not destroyed.

Four months passed, and it was time to do it all over again. Hair in cap, legs in stirrups, squirt. Afterward I tossed the photo of embryo number two in with the post-op paperwork, uninterested in contemplating its potential. Today I have all the evidence I need in the form of a sturdy one-year-old boy named Levi. But Levi’s very first photo? Yeah, I don’t know where that went.