I went to California to talk about “microscopic Americans”. In a beige office in a Los Angeles suburb I spoke to Ron Stoddart about “frozen orphanages”, “pre-born children” and the “mothers of former embryos”. Later, in an ordered Southern California living room, I met four-year-old Mikayla, conceived in the late 1990s by Tad and Veronica Hiley but born in 2001 to Sharon Tesdall, who poured fresh lemonade as she told me about her nine-year struggle with infertility — “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me”. The next day, beside the impeccable blue of the family pool, I talked to Bob and Betty Burnett about their children, twins Sam and Grace, who were conceived through IVF, and why the couple decided to give (“relinquish”) their six remaining embryos to Jeff and Danette, an infertile couple from Fresno. Which brings us back to the subject of microscopic Americans.
If you want Ron Stoddart’s opinion, there are microscopic Britons too. More than 28,000 couples a year undergo IVF in Britain and because, to be on the safe side, fertility doctors try to harvest more embryos than the couple want children, hundreds of thousands of these specks of life are currently stored in deep freezers around the country. If IVF fails, a couple can always have another go by having their remaining embryos thawed and implanted. Pregnancy is often so unimaginable to a person who has been unable to conceive naturally that the question of what to do with the “leftovers” comes up only after the birth of the longed-for child. Even then a decision is typically put off and most couples prefer to pay the annual storage fees of around £250 indefinitely, or at least for five years, when any spare embryos must by law be destroyed.
Ron had his big idea nine years ago while listening to a radio programme on the fate of Britain’s unclaimed frozen embryos: pre-born children to Ron. As the chief executive of an adoption agency, he decided to apply the lessons of open adoption — in which birth and adoptive parents meet and often sustain a rudimentary, arm’s-length relationship — to embryos. Through Ron’s Snowflakes programme, genetic parents such as Bob and Betty Burnett could select who they considered to be responsible parents for the children they could not afford to bring to term themselves. For infertile “adopting” couples such as Sharon and Larry Tesdall, implanting Tad and Veronica’s embryo into Sharon’s womb represented a “cure for the disease of infertility”.
In 1985 Sharon married her long-term boyfriend, Larry, but he caught a virus and doctors told him that this was probably why he couldn’t father a child. The Tesdalls did some soul-searching and tried IVF, but the experience was humiliating and ultimately failed. They were put off for good in 1996 when Ricardo Asch, one of the doctors at their fertility clinic, was exposed for having taken eggs and embryos from patients without their knowledge and implanting them in other women or giving them to research.
The Tesdalls thought hard and abandoned one of their cherished dreams in the process — “You know the one where you fantasise about what your kids would look like between you and him” — but could not accept a childless future. Five years ago, to their great relief and joy, the couple adopted a boy, Ian.
(Ian’s 17-year-old mother hid her pregnancy for seven months. Compare this to how Betty Burnett felt about giving away her spare embryos: “I am a 40-year-old woman with a great job and two wonderful kids and I’m in the same situation as a 16-year-old giving up her baby.”)
Still, questions lurked at the back of Sharon’s mind. She had never given birth. In her darker moments she doubted that she was a real mother. There are many people in America who believe that an embryo is not a few cells in a Petri dish but a real child. Some go so far as to describe a two or three-day-old frozen embryo as a “slave” trapped in a frozen orphanage, an attractive analogy for their “adoptive” mothers who not only get to experience pregnancy but automatically take on the role of liberator. Sharon found out about Snowflakes through the influential Christian group Focus on the Family. “We realised that these are children,” Sharon told me. “Just earlier.”
If you’re thinking about “adopting” a Snowflake baby, first you have to fill out a form. You’ll be asked questions about your religious beliefs, ancestry and education. You will be quizzed on the market value of your home, the square footage of living space in your home and the total square footage of your home, including the garage. Hopeful parents with a poor credit rating or a criminal record go to the bottom of the pile at Snowflakes. Single mothers, lesbians and unmarried couples need not apply.
If you’re still thinking about “adopting” a Snowflake baby, you’ll also have to put together a scrapbook — your opportunity to tell genetic parents a bit about yourself or, rather, your only chance to convince them of the depth and validity of your relationship. Sharon sat me down and showed me her and Larry’s painstakingly assembled scrapbook, which was plastered with photographs of Sharon and Larry getting on brilliantly. The accompanying text — upbeat yet somehow heartbreaking — told the story of their own conservative childhood, their traditional courtship and their strong marriage. The subtext of most of these scrapbooks is that only a child will keep the happy marriage together.
Genetic families fill out a questionnaire too but the emphasis here is on the health and physical descriptions of biological parents, grandparents and great-grandparents: their outstanding features, who died of what, any hormonal or mental disorders (information that is not necessarily available about the child who languishes in a real-life orphanage). Eventually the forms find their way back to Snowflakes and, much in the same manner as a dating agency, the matchmaking process begins.
Questionnaires and scrapbooks are exchanged by post and eventually a contract is signed. This pact is supposed to be bilateral but the balance of power seems to sit, initially, with the donors and their magical powers. How else do you knock up an infertile woman?
It was all right in the end: Sharon and Larry got their embryos. They were FedExed to California from North Carolina and Sharon had the perfect pregnancy — the cost of around $5,000 (£2,900) is about a third of what it costs for IVF (genetic families are not paid, for ethical reasons). Did Sharon ever have any doubts? “That they (Mikayla’s family) were tall and I was short. I was worried that she’d be too big a baby for me to carry.”
A Snowflakes embryo isn’t any old embryo. Because it isn’t anonymously donated (Ron prefers “abandoned”) any resulting child will grow up unencumbered by the unanswerable questions about his genetic past: whose child am I? In what circumstances was I conceived? Do I have any genetic siblings, and so on. The programme was created to give genetic parents peace of mind, the assurance that their spare embryos will go to the best possible home. Definition of the best possible home? The home that most closely resembles the home of the genetic family. Isn’t that human nature? Married, white, educated Christian couples want married, white, educated, Christian couples to look after their embryos. Ditto white Jewish couples, or black Muslims (so far no Muslims on the programme, although there are Jews). Sometimes genetic parents ask for too much: a guarantee that adoptive parents will never get divorced, for example, or the assurance that God approves. Sometimes families get on so well that they go on holiday together. Many describe their relationship as “that of cousins”.
