More on the campaign to ban IVF. In my first post I said total opposition to IVF was "the logical end" of Bush's position on embryos. Slate's Liza Mundy does some actual reporting and finds that indeed, the embryo adoption agency Bush did his photo op with "opposes IVF medicine because of what doctors rather antiseptically refer to as 'embryo wastage' but tries to make the best of the situation by giving some of them a living future. Like conventional pro-life groups, Snowflakes even does 'rescues,' springing into action whenever it hears about a couple on the verge of no longer paying storage fees."
I'm not sure what 'rescues' means in this context, but it hints at something else I thought about. Embryo storage costs about $1,000 a year. Making some very rough estimates that (500,000 frozen embryos total at, say, five per couple) the annual cost of storage is about $100 million per year. If it's that important to Snowflakes, or Sam Brownback, or George Bush, or society that these embryos not be donated for research or destroyed, why don't they, or the taxpayers, pick up the tab?
Anyway, there's lots of interesting stuff in Mundy's article. One thing that's left vague is the following: " Typically, embryos are frozen in tubes called straws, a few at a time; depending on how many embryos were created to begin with and how many were used, an IVF patient might have one, two, or 12 left over. To maximize a recipient's chances of success, agencies will guarantee a minimum number of embryos, and if this means mixing two or three groups of unrelated embies (as they're called), so be it."
Mundy introduces this concept in order to point out that "a woman receiving donor embryos can gestate twins that are genetically unrelated. It would be intriguing to know if, when he was proffering the Snowflakes babies, the president fully appreciated what a freaky, cutting-edge niche of reproductive medicine he was endorsing."
True enough, but I wonder whether Snowflakes insists that every embryo that is adopted is implanted immediately, and how it balances the risks that implies, considering that it doesn't have the option that IVF clinics do of choosing the best embryos, saving remainders for a second round, or selectively reducing.
