I don’t really know what to say about this article. It had to have taken a lot of bad decisions for doctors and scientists to have painted themselves into this corner, all starting with treating human beings as objects.
Tens of thousands of human embryos hang in cold storage in Canada’s fertility clinics, an unknown number of which are “orphans.”
Increasingly, however, clinics are preparing to match these embryos — which could survive for decades in suspended animation — with infertile couples who long for a child of their own. It’s a form of third-party procreation that experts predict will only become more common as the number of surplus embryos grows.
Embryo donation has been called the most humane answer to an sticky ethical situation: How to dispose of leftover embryos that are created by infertility treatments and then literally frozen in time?
Personally, I don’t have a problem with people adopting embryos. It’s better than them living in frozen stasis for 15 years until they can no longer survive, and I don’t see it as very much different from anonymous adoption of children who have already been born. If nothing else, it’s certainly better than the other two options: destruction or using them for science experiments. However, I think it’s incredibly sad that we’ve gotten ourselves into this position in the first place.