Embryo Adoption: This Is Really a Thing That Is Happening

Who knew that “Every Sperm is Sacred” would be an anthem of the now-inevitable nadir of the abortion debate? Case in point: Evangelical couples doing their part to save babies by adopting… other couples’ frozen embryos. And then unfreezing the embryos, implanting them in evangelical wombs, giving birth to them, and parading their miracle popsicle babies around as examples of how they’d been fully human this whole time.

If you follow the logic of the personhood movement, adopting frozen embryos not only makes sense, it’s a moral imperative. Because life begins at conception and couples who are using In Vitro Fertilization to conceive often create extra embryos that they freeze for possible future use, by the power of Greyskull, there are therefore hundreds of thousands of actual babies frozen in warehouses across the country. Babies that need adopting. From the Huffington Post,

During a decade-long stretch of federal funding to promote embryo adoption, evangelical organizations received most of the $21 million doled out. That funding was cut in July, but leaders at those organizations say the word is spreading about embryo adoption.

“These families are happy, and they tend to write blogs and Facebook,” said Reg Finger, a doctor affiliated with the National Embryo Donation Center, which relied on federal grants.

I can only hope that similar word is spreading about the more than 400,000 already-born children with eyes and arms and smiles and memories and feelings who are currently in foster care!

Another weird thing that happened during the George W. Bush administration (which, in retrospect, feels like a thing America can’t believe it did one time it was drunk, uh, for 8 years) — a summit at the White House for children who had been born as a result of embryo adoption. President Bush called them “snowflakes” and chastised an America that views extra fertilized embryos as “spare parts.”

Despite the fact that funding to the program was cut due to a lack of interest, Reg Finger believes that embryo adoption’s time has come. Early Christians were super into helping the poor and downtrodden, and so it only makes sense that in the 21st century, megachurchgoers would focus on helping the embryos. Christians caring about actual poor people? So first century.