A baby in Oregon was adopted by a couple after 19 years in frozen suspension, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
Baby Liam was adopted by a woman who had trouble conceiving after his parents decided not to expand their family.
There are currently 400,000-600,000 embryos frozen across the country. Half will be implanted in women. Others are discarded or donated to research. Only 1.5 percent of these embryos are adopted.
Stories like Liam’s bring to light the issue of embryo abandonment.
Embryo abandonment is a problem every clinic faces. As long as the freezer bill is paid, the embryo is safe — for years, decades, maybe generations.That growing longevity on ice raises an ethical issue. "Imagine in a thousand years someone doing IVF with a long-frozen embryo just to see what a 21st-century — or, in this case, 20th-century — human being was like," said Hank Greely, director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences.
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