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Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 99. I'm Lanette.

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And I'm Shaun.

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And today we are excited to share an episode talking about embryo adoption. It's really more of an introductory episode.

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We are wrapping up our National Adoption Month series and we're wrapping up our fourth season in the next couple of episodes.

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So today we're going to be exploring what embryo adoption is, how it's similar, how it's different from what we're going to call traditional adoption.

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Thanks so much for being here with us.

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So when I said that this is an introduction episode, to be clear, it really was like an introduction for us, for me and Shaun.

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We were really lucky to have some friends of some of our friends offer us embryos a few years ago.

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And at that point we really weren't interested in growing our families. We didn't explore that.

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So this was really our first time taking a serious look at what embryo adoption is.

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Yeah. So this kind of stems back to a couple years ago.

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I was running a marathon in California and just happened to start running next to this guy.

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And we started chatting. I think we ran for like, I don't know, probably more than half of the marathon together.

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Which is a long time. It's many, many miles. 13 miles.

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Yeah. Almost a couple hours. And we started kind of talking about family and stuff.

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And he mentioned that our children were adopted at birth. And he then shared that their youngest, who I think was just about to be born, had been an embryo adoption.

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And I was fascinated by the thought. And like Lanette mentioned, we kind of heard about it and just didn't know a lot.

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So we talked about it during the race. And I have stayed in touch with him, you know, kind of following each other and seeing what races we're doing and those type of things.

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And recently reached out to him and his wife and they agreed to share some of their experience and some of just kind of the intro basics to help us understand what embryo adoption is.

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Yeah. So we are super grateful for them for sharing. And also for those listening, if you have experience with embryo adoption, I expect that we're going to miss some things.

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Please reach out and let us know. Yeah. This is a topic we're planning on exploring more, especially when we go into the new year and the new season.

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You can email us at openadoptionproject.gmail.com if you have any thoughts or if you have questions that you'd like for us to explore further in the future, too.

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Yeah. Yeah. All right. So now we're going to cut to this family sharing about their experience with embryo adoption.

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Well, we are now on the podcast with some friends who not too long ago did embryo adoption and now have a child that's about a year old.

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We've never done an episode about embryo adoption. So we're really excited to hear your experience and your story and then ask you some questions to understand more about the process and more about maybe even the thought process that goes behind doing embryo adoption and some other considerations.

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So if you wouldn't mind just kind of jump in and share your experience and then we'll go to those questions afterward.

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Well, basically, we suffer through infertility. So for our first child, we did do IVF and then we use the remaining embryos and no child after that.

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So after that, several miscarriages, we thought, OK, maybe we want to adopt. And so we went through the, you know, the home study process and everything.

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And a friend reached out to me through Facebook and she's like, I know you've already had a child. I'm currently pregnant through embryo adoption.

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Maybe this is something you'd be interested in. I had never heard of it. And that was eight years ago. So that was my first introduction to embryo adoption.

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Going forward, I said, that sounds very interesting. I told a really close friend of mine, her husband, worked with someone just word of mouth. Honestly, that's how it came out through that time. And we actually made a connection with the family.

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And we were so close of actually getting the embryos and she last minute backed out. So that's one thing that can still happen through embryo adoption.

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However, it worked out. We decided to give our bodies another shot and we did. And we had another child and then twins after that.

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And then we used another embryo, our last embryo, and it didn't result in a child. So the bug was still in my ear. I knew I wanted my fifth child.

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So I did some convincing and research and I joined some websites that have embryo adoption and just kind of connected with different families. And we made a well, yeah, we finally made a connection.

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We said, oh, that couple looks nice. Let's connect with them. Oh, they're in California. Okay, well, let's see where in California they are.

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Oh, they live in our same town. And then it was like, oh, my goodness, we have mutual friends that know each other.

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It was pretty crazy, the connection and my best friend lived like two streets down from them.

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And anyway, so that I think helped us because they were like, wow. I mean, and then it made it a little bit scarier because then I'm like, we would see them all the time.

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You know, will we see them all the time? Anyways, it just felt right. And they liked us, we liked them and they offered an embryo to us and we went forward and we did it and it resulted in a baby.

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And here we are 18 months out with another child and a completion to our family. And he's just like one of the others. It's been great. So.

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That's awesome. Yeah. So, especially with the legal process, what was the process really like as you went from being interested in embryo adoption to actually going through that process.

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So it's different than traditional adoption. It's more so a property transfer.

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There's different ways some also it just depends what clinic you're using some clinics require an actual lawyer.

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And so you have to hire a lawyer so it can be costly in that aspect.

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We matched through NRFA families that have remaining embryos, put their profile, vice versa. We put our profile and that's how we would message and you pay like monthly membership dues to help make the connections and they actually offer assistance and making a legal contract.

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And they give it to them and then they give it to you until you compromise on all the things that you want in and out of the contract. And that's basically the only legal thing I mean because they don't look at as an actual child yet.

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It's more of a property.

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So interesting.

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Yeah, so I'm thinking about what type of information you're putting on a profile I know I know like in our experience doing adoption.

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You know, it could be quite fast. But what type of what type of information did you share did they share that matched you.

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Well I think they really like that we had, I was afraid we would never get picked because we'd already had four biological children of our own I was like, we are no one is going to pick us. Yeah, no one no one feels sorry.

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You know, no one feels sorry for a family that has four kids already that is begging for one more. But what they really liked was because we had a big family and we lived in their same town.

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They have. So she, they're a mixed family. She had three children, he had one, they had one together so five total, and they really like the aspect of having this potential embryo being born into a big family, like, if he were to be born in their family,

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they've maxed out they shouldn't have. They didn't want to have any more kids but they didn't want to destroy the embryo or do anything else to it so we're so grateful that they actually gave the embryo a chance at life so.

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And that kind of brings me to a question I was thinking about so some of the ethical considerations in embryo adoption I know that there's a lot on the side of, you know, parents who are going through in vitro and have to choose whether they're going to

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destroy embryos, pre embryos long term. What were some of the maybe ethical considerations that you had to make as as parents.

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I mean, one thing on our side would be, you know, what it would be like discussing it with the child down the road.

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But in my personal opinion, I think that this is going to be much more common in the years to come, especially with more conversations. So it won't be that difficult of a conversation, and it will be such a common occurrence.

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In terms of ethical considerations, you have that discussion amongst each other and then amongst the family that you're adopting from. Will there be some sort of visitation or contact or what, whatnot, and you know their family was, it was no big deal with them

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they're like, Yeah, whatever. If you want to be Facebook friends, cool. That's good enough for us, you know, even in our court, and I felt, I didn't know how I'd feel after having the child if I would feel comfortable with them meeting them. But I felt such a strong connection to him I didn't feel threatened that I felt like he could meet them and he's my child and they respect that and they just are so happy and they love him and just more people that love him. So we've seen he's seen them many times.

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Yeah, we've seen them half a dozen times at parks or this or that just, you know, we'll text each other and meet up and, you know, it's not a big deal for them.

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It's not like it was the first time it was like a little scary, but after that it was, I mean Scott makes things so simple and comfortable.

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Awesome. So, did you receive any kind of training or guidance about how to connect these children born from embryo adoption to donors, or like any training about the challenges that might arise from that.

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Yeah, apart from the process, I believe, I don't know if all the clinics but the clinic that we went to required a psychologist, and now you know we met with a psychologist.

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And she did indeed know what we're getting ourselves into, you know what are you know how would we do just she just talked about everything, and she just gave her clearance that yes, they are making a valid decision and they know what they're doing so.

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So, go building off of that like what were some of your concerns or maybe trepidations in the beginning before maybe before you met with her or before you maybe go a little bit deeper and understanding more about embryo adoption, what were some of the things that

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you were concerned about? I know I'm part of an embryo adoption group on Facebook and I know a lot of women do feel like will I love this child, I mean they have that fear of will they love this child, like here they are pregnant with someone else's embryo,

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will they love that child, love their own. And I think everyone kind of like will I love this child, you know, and I always you know for my number one to number two child I was always like, could I love this child as much as I love this first one?

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Well yes, so that's the only thing that I feel like, I don't know what do you think? Yeah, before the baby came but yeah. I mean it's a little scary I'm like, you know how things, I mean how late, as a teenager, you know anything I mean,

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will this, will he not like how he came about? Will he not look like, you know.

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Yeah, well will he look like? You don't know, I mean we did pick donors, their children kind of resembled our children so we wanted him not to really stand out but some people say he looks just like us, some people are like he has a different look, you know, I mean we just kind of go with it.

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How and when do you start talking about it?

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With, with your child and yeah what thoughts have you had around that?

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You know we've kind of, yeah the psychologist asked us that, and we really didn't have an answer we said it might be at age six, it might be 16, we just don't know. I don't think it'll be 16, I honestly think when he starts understanding maybe how kids are created I mean I've kind of put

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the seed in my other kids not just explain that they were IVF babies, and like hey, there are seeds from mom and seeds from dad and that's, they joined together to make you and the doctor put them inside of me, and you grew.

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And I kind of plan kind of saying you know Cohen came from special different seeds because we weren't making any more seeds of our own. And that's kind of, that's, I feel like, how you can kind of maybe explain it.

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Yeah, it's appropriate. Yeah.

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So they understand really.

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Sure. So, met with a psychologist. How often like once or was it once you just have to tell. It's definitely not as intense as traditional adoption.

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Interesting. We didn't have to do a home study. However, I do know there is a one website, maybe it's called snowflakes and that's where all these embryos are. I'm not sure for sure if that's it but they do require home study so there are some places that require

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home study for embryo adoption.

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Honestly, it just depends what clinic you go to and it's all, maybe because it's new, not everything's the same.

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I remember when we were running the marathon talking about this you said that you had. I think this is maybe before transfer that you had gone out to dinner with them.

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What, what were some of the like topics of conversation at that like I can't.

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I'm trying to imagine that conversation. That picture. Great question to be honest, I don't know if any part of that entire two hour evening together was discussing any aspect of the embryo adoption.

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It was just laughing and getting to know them like friends you know I'm building trust, you know that, you know, we were joking that it felt like a date like a blind date and we're trying to impress them so that they give us the embryo.

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Yeah, it was just kind of funny. So a lot of joking and having fun and getting to know them and building that trust but you know, it certainly wasn't didn't feel at all like any sort of interview, like you might see on the traditional adoption side.

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So, yeah, I mean that was just our experience I don't know how it is for other couples out there but for us I mean they're just real chill people. Yes, yeah, they just know that no problems at all on their end, they, they had a blended family, and then did IVF and had a handful of embryos

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remaining so that's how you know they say look we're too busy to worry about anyone else we've got our own family to worry about. So, they had like 12 leftovers so he's like, I am having this mini kids, we have some time, but but I will say that based on the profiles

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that we read and, you know, on this website. Different people have different thoughts and feelings on that some people said on their little profile look I will definitely want to visit this baby and other people said, we don't want any ties to anything.

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And you know so it's going to be different from everyone we just got lucky to find a couple that lives really close to us, and actually, you know about a five minute drive from us, and they wanted nothing, you know no restrictions at all or didn't need visitation didn't need any sort of pre

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pre scripted plans on this. Yeah, but I do have one funny story this is, we had to get the embryo from one clinic to another. So, Rochelle physically drove the embryo with a canister that has the cryo you know the freezing embryo inside in the passenger seat,

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buckled up. I buckled up in our minivan. Of course, and I drove them two hours to another clinic, because we transfer somewhere else.

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And I, you know it's kind of funny I could tell him you wrote in my car before you were even conceived.

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So crazy. You were in me you were in a little.

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I have a picture of it too.

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I would never think that you'd be in charge of transferring.

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To be it would cost like 600 bucks or something to have a company do it, and you can do it yourself. So we did it.

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Yeah, you're like, why not. Yeah, I wasn't driving across country I was just driving a little bit there. I mean, I felt better about me doing it than someone else.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, that is that's cool. You, you wrote in my car, not in a car seat.

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Yes.

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It was pretty well protected it was a very hard and still long bottle thing. And I said if you get pulled you go as fast as you want to go because if you get pulled over that top is going to let you go.

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He's gonna mess up, have to hurry.

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Awesome. Beautiful. You guys thank you so much for sharing with us we really appreciate it. Thank you for having us.

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We are so grateful for these friends and for them being willing to share their experience and it was really, I mean, I think you could tell by some of our reactions that was just really eye opening to us and I think that Lanette and I have spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about adoption.

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And what we have known to be adoption and there are some really, of course, stark differences but there are so many similarities. And there were things that surprised us and things that felt like yeah that feels good.

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Yeah, I was so surprised by some of that juxtaposition of the contrast the similarities and the differences. You know, you might remember we had a recent episode here on the podcast where we talked to Dr. Michael grand.

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Yeah, and he mentioned how there's a lack of discussion and research involving reproductive technology and its effects on the children created through reproductive technology.

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And this conversation with him really planted the seeds I think of curiosity in my mind.

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And so as we started working on this episode, I picked up his book, the adoption constellation by Dr. Michael grand, it is excellent. And he has a section about embryo adoption, where he talks quite a bit about it.

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And so I thought we would share just a couple of thoughts he shared in his book.

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Alright, so he said that attitudes and practices and adoption will affect other forms of creating families. So essentially traditional adoption is kind of setting the tone for what other non conventional family building might look like.

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Yeah, but then he also said that this new age of reproductive possibilities. This is a quote brings with it an assortment of ethical and practical concerns that seem to be mirrored in the practice of adoption.

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However, not everyone working in the field of assisted reproductive technology accepts the notion that what has been learned and adoption is directly relevant to the practice of assisted reproduction.

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He shares a couple of examples. It's really fascinating. I'll just share one of them. So I think it was in 2009. There was a statement, or maybe it was a scholarly article but it was in the United States.

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Something called defining embryo donation produced by the Ethics Committee of the American Society for reproductive medicine.

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And it basically says that using the term adoption for embryos is inaccurate and misleading. And they claimed that it could place burdens that are inappropriate for embryos that have been donated, because adoption cannot and does not apply to embryos, because embryos hold the potential for life but are not people.

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I thought that was really interesting. That is interesting. Yeah, and then Dr. Grant says that there's not a recognition of potential psychological consequences that come from coming into the world through the use of reproductive technology.

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And the use of these embryos or donated other genetic material, right, donated sperm or eggs, from sources outside of the family, there's not any recognition that there could be psychological impacts of having other family members who aren't part of your recognized family through these assisted reproductive technology means.

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Anyway, really interesting. So, one more thought from Dr. Grant, I could like read the whole section and would have a really excellent episode but that might be a little sketchy and I don't want to share all of his work.

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But it's really good. I recommend this book really highly. This is in the last part of the book I think it's the last chapter.

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He says openness as a guiding principle of adoption practice is at the heart of our current thinking in the field. Today parents choose to share their identities with families, whom they have personally selected for the raising of their children.

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And then he goes on and talks about how it's become increasingly normal for families to have contact with birth family and adoptive family, how there's like this network of support how you have visits and it's like this organic extended family.

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And he says openness and adoption is thought to be foundational for establishing successful relationships between genetically unrelated individuals. And that's why it's so effective and traditional adoption but then he says, so why has this been rejected as a basis for forming relationships

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and families created through assisted reproductive technology. Yeah, and I mean I'm really glad that our friends have connection with the donors, and they have a relationship, and I think she mentioned you know, the more love that our child has and more or feels and more

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support like that sounds like conversations that we've had around the importance of openness and traditional adoption. Yeah, and it sounds like a lot of embryo adoptions at least when this book was written not that long ago.

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That maybe kind of reject that sentiment. Yeah, so from what I found when I was looking this up, it looks like today in North America, there's no legislation governing governing the adoption of embryos.

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So, there's really no like procedures or policies for training or anything. And like these people said on the show a minute ago, there's not. It's treated as the exchange of property. Yeah, you're not dealing with a person when you adopt an embryo like it's treated as.

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Yeah, it's the potential of life. It's very strange. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's hard to wrap my head around thinking of an embryo as property, and it's a transfer of property and kind of building on what you were saying like, at some point in our conversation

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together she mentioned that it kind of depended on which company that you worked with. So the ones that she worked with, or they worked with required that you have some type of psychological evaluation, other companies or other organizations that facilitate these adoptions

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or transfer of embryos require more of a home study approach. And it's interesting, when you said that there's no legislation. I thought of the just mountains of legislation that have now existed around adoption. Yeah, and wonder what that holds for the future of embryo adoption.

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It's so interesting because, I mean, I don't know, I'm not one of these people, like these children who are being directly affected by these decisions, but I have to wonder what it's going to look like as they enter adulthood.

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We have this generation of children who were created through reproductive technology, right? And like, such a chasm and how that looks, those connections that they might want with biological family and because it is different.

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And so this is a really big topic. And so Shaun and I were wondering what the experiences of some of our social media followers in our circles on Instagram and Facebook from our open adoption project page, we were curious what people would think about some of these things

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that we've been wondering about so we posted a little survey a few weeks ago. So we had a very small sample size. I mean it was like 20 something people. And so this is obviously by no means scientific.

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So we're so grateful for everyone who did participate.

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So looking at who took the survey. We had 15% of our participants who identified as being adopted.

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25% were birth parents.

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55% were adopted parents or foster care providers.

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We do not have anyone who's adopted an embryo take the survey. And then 15% were adoption professionals and 5% were friends or family members of someone in the adoption community.

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So looking at that. One of the most interesting things to me was that over 90% of those who took the survey said that they think home studies and counseling should be a mandatory step for embryo adoption. And then if you adjust it and just look at adoptees and birth parents who were surveyed.

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100% of adoptees and birth parents said that they think home studies and counseling should be a mandatory part of embryo adoption. Those who did not think it should be a mandatory part were adoptive or foster parents.

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Interesting. Yeah, I thought that was so interesting. Yeah.

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What are maybe key takeaways that you saw from the data or from the survey that was. Yeah. Yeah. So the adoptees who were surveyed cited more concerns about the ethics of embryo adoption.

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And the birth parents have fewer ethical concerns. One birth parents said, I don't see a problem with embryo adoption sounds like a great experience for the adoptive mother and maybe less traumatic for the biological mother.

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I think that goes to part of a conversation that we were having around the difference in the experience for each person or each guest participant in an embryo adoption.

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The adoptive parent plays a similar role. I think that the embryo adoptee will probably have some similar experiences to an adoptee in a traditional adoption. But yeah, the birth parent or in this case the donors have a very different experience than birth parents do.

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That's really interesting. And so so many similarities, but then also differences where I think that comment that this birth parent shared is spot on. It does sound like it could be potentially a lot less traumatic as well for birth parents.

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Yeah. Because yeah, it's not the same. It's just totally different. And the reasons that adoption is being chosen is different and experiences. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean that makes sense. It's so different.

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So when we look at the most common ethical concerns that stood out to people who took the survey, 90% of those who took the survey said that they'd be concerned about unknown impacts or lack of understanding of long term impacts.

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So I mean, it's kind of what this whole episode's been about. There's so much that we just don't know.

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And then 75% were concerned about psychological implications for children born from embryo adoption. And another 75% again were concerned about dialogue of origins in the home. Are you talking about the story and like, is this being addressed?

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And then the other concern that most people shared was 70% of the people who took the survey said they'd be worried about contact or relationships with the biological or the donor family.

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Fewer people were concerned about treatment of embryos as private property. And then also very few of the respondents who were surveyed were concerned about the possibility of mixed upset transfer.

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And I'm sure there's a lot of other ethical concerns that we just didn't think to put on here. Yeah. But a few thoughts from people who took the survey. One said, I really struggled to wrap my head around embryo adoption. It seems complex.

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It seems murky from an ethical standpoint, but the same could be said about sperm donorship.

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And then another person said, any child not genetically related to the parents will need extra supports and parents who are mindful of the difference between bio child versus child of adoption.

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The other comments were things like I feel like openness is so important in every case, including these. And I would be really interested in the difference in trauma in embryo adoption versus traditional.

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So those were some of the findings that we found from our little unscientific survey. I thought it was super interesting though. I did a little research also on Google Scholar just to see what academic research more recently and currently is saying about embryo adoption.

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And since I'm not like a scholar, I didn't have real access to all of the information out there. But from what I saw, it looked like the current research really focuses on parents, which is very similar to traditional adoption.

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You're looking at research. It's so adoptive parent focused. It's kind of mad. It's very maddening. But there were some interesting findings, but they didn't really seem to consider impacts felt by the children. Just what like the parents observed, what the parents shared.

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So there's a skew there. There was an article I found that's called a meta analysis that was basically looking at a bunch of different studies done in Europe. It was in the European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Journal.

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It was called Are the Children Alright? A Systematic Review of Psychological Adjustment of Children Conceived by Assisted Reproductive Technologies. And there were two studies, two findings that stood out to me from this analysis.

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Studies analyzed seemed to indicate that similar to those in traditional households, the psychological adjustment of children raised in assisted reproductive technology families appear to rely on the parents' well-being, the nature and quality of relationships inside the family, and the assistance of the wider community and social occasions they are raised in.

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So ultimately, the well-being of the children really depends on the well-being of the parents and what the support networks look like and assisted reproductive technology families.

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And then another study that they highlighted analyzed and raised this kind of hypothesis that the absence of a gestational connection with parents and their children could be more problematic for children than the absence of a genetic relationship. But the difference wasn't verified when the children were older.

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And so I thought this was interesting. We'll see what it pans out to look like as time goes on. I am not an adopted individual, so I really can't speak to this. But I thought it was an interesting thing to kind of mull over. Is it about having a genetic relationship or a gestational connection?

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Yeah, because there is that gestational period. Yeah, when you have assisted reproductive technology, you adopt an embryo and yet you're carrying it. But what does that imply for bonds with fathers? That's my question, right? Like biological fathers too, if they're not connected to gestation, does that mean those bonds are weaker too? I don't know. It's interesting.

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Yeah, so this has been like just fascinating to think about. And I mean, there's so much more to wrap our minds around when it comes to to all of this. And yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, there's so much more room for research in this field. We have a lot more to learn. And we would just love to do a little shout out if you are someone you know is an adult who experienced assisted reproductive technology in your own birth. We would love to hear your experiences straight from you, those who are most impacted.

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Those who are most impacted by these experiences. So if you're willing, please reach out. We would love to have you share either anonymously or not. And yeah, I mean, I mean, just there's so much to learn as a podcast, we try to be very adoptee focused. And this episode, again, is very introductory in its nature.

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And we were really frustrated that yeah, we couldn't really have it be more embryo adoptee focused. And so if you know someone who knows someone who has experience, we would love to speak to them and have them on a future episode. Yeah. So we'll be back with our final episode for National Adoption Month tomorrow. And until then, thank you so much for listening.

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Thank you.