About 400,000 human
embryos are kept in frozen storage in the United States,
with little agreement on what to do with the thousands
that are unclaimed.
Donate them for
research? Give them to infertile couples? Keep them in
Dr. Michael Feinman sees them as potential life. "It's
unconscionable to have freezers with unclaimed embryos,"
Nationally, the closest
thing to a count of unclaimed embryos is about 16,000 -
a figure that came out of a 2002 study for the Society
for Assisted Reproductive Technology, a Washington,
D.C., agency that oversees about 94 percent of fertility
clinics. The study, called "Cryopreserved Embryos in the
United States and Their Availability for Research,"
suggests that up to 4 percent of the nation's frozen
embryos are unclaimed.
Feinman, with 10
percent unclaimed just in his California office, said he
believes the national number might be higher. "Nobody
really knows how many unclaimed embryos there are, but
they're in the hundreds of thousands," he said.
An "unclaimed" embryo
is one whose donors haven't renewed their storage
contract or responded to repeated correspondence from
the storage facility.
In his office, Feinman
unscrewed a sealed lid on a cryogenic tank as a cloud of
liquid nitrogen billowed out. He reached into the
cream-colored metal can - which was just a bit larger
than an old-fashioned milk can - to reveal a smaller
metal can inside. Around the periphery of the smaller
can are dozens of straws no larger than coffee stirrers.
Each straw contains five or six frozen embryos, which
are smaller than the tip of a needle.
A frozen embryo is
essentially a human egg that has been fertilized by
sperm in a petri dish, and then frozen. Research is
being conducted right now on methods to successfully
freeze unfertilized eggs, but to date, unfertilized eggs
are considered too fragile to freeze for use in
One Los Angeles
cryogenic storage facility, California Cryobank, reports
100 to 200 of its embryos are unclaimed, although it
doesn't keep track of the total number of embryos. It
counts clients - also 100 to 200 - each of whom stores
anywhere from one to dozens of embryos.
"This is the elephant
in the room. Every doctor is stressed about embryo
storage growing bigger and bigger and bigger," said
JoAnn Eiman, founder of Snowflake Frozen Embryo
Adoption, a California adoption agency for leftover
The reasons people
neglect their frozen embryos vary. Sometimes people
simply forget about them, Feinman said.
"A couple comes in from
out of town, does an egg retrieval, gets pregnant with
twins and they're busy off with their twins and their
lives or they move and you lose track of them," Feinman
Randy and Tammy Smith
say they didn't understand they would be responsible for
frozen fertilized eggs left over from their in vitro
procedure. The Smiths, checking on a lark on what they
thought were unfertilized eggs in storage, discovered
they had leftover embryos in storage since 1990.
Tammy Smith, a
39-year-old kindergarten teacher and already a mother of
four, had heard a radio program about donating eggs. It
made her curious about whether she had eggs left over
from her in vitro fertilization procedure at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Randy Smith, also a
teacher, said he was stunned when his wife called to
tell him they had 13 embryos, not eggs, sitting in a
Because they believe
life begins at conception, the couple arranged to have
all of the embryos thawed and the viable ones implanted.
One attached to Tammy's uterus, and some national
fertility experts believe her baby, Micah, who arrived
Oct. 18, was born from what could be the oldest embryo
ever used successfully.
"This isn't the first
time I've seen cases like this where patients later
discover that they have embryos that they never knew
about," attorney Melanie Blum said. "I've seen this
happen over and over and over again."
Shortly after the
Smiths made their discovery, they contacted Blum, who
specializes in reproductive law, to sue the doctor who
fertilized the eggs. Blum filed the complaint, but a
Santa Monica judge dismissed it.
Nobody is sure why the
Smiths weren't notified about the frozen embryos. For 11
years, the Smiths said, nobody contacted them, billed
them or even told them the embryos existed.
Dr. Mark Surrey, the in
vitro specialist who mixed Micah's embryo in a petri
dish 13 years ago, said that as far as he knows, his
office did try to contact the Smiths and "completely
Surrey was working at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at the time.
representative Sandy Van looked into it but got no
"It's so long ago, I
wouldn't have anybody who would know," she said.
She noted Cedars' in
vitro fertilization lab was destroyed in the 1994
Northridge earthquake, although she wasn't sure if that
was a contributing factor.
Feinman, who performed
the in vitro procedure that resulted in Micah's birth,
would not be surprised if somebody lost track of the
Smiths, who moved three times during the past 13 years.
He pointed out that computer tracking was not nearly as
"You lose track of them
unless you have an automated system that sends out a
letter that says, 'Don't forget you have frozen embryos
and you owe us $500,' " Feinman said.