Clare Kilcullen always wanted to be a mother, but when she went through early menopause in her 20s, she wasn’t sure how that would happen.
“[I thought] it would probably be an egg donor, but then in my 30s, I still hadn’t met the right person, so I decided to go and do it on my own,” Kilcullen told CBS News.
In July, Kilcullen gave birth to her daughter, Marlowe, thanks to a frozen embryo donated by a couple from Canada.
Embryo donation is gaining in popularity. Frozen donated embryo transfers in the United States nearly quadrupled from 2004 to 2019, according to a study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. It’s estimated there are currently more than 1 million frozen embryos in the U.S. — many from those reluctant to discard them after they are done with their cycles of in vitro fertilization.
“Most people usually keep them in storage in case they change their mind later,” said Dr. Richard Paulson, a fertility specialist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
In 1986, Paulson was part of a team that reported the first successful birth from a frozen embryo in the U.S.
“We’ve been trying to get embryo donation off the ground for a very long time,” Paulson said. “It’s very complicated to do, because of logistics, because of legal issues, because of the fact that the parents probably were not tested for genetic disease.”
But one company is working to make embryo donation more accessible.
Kilcullen met her donors through Empower With Moxi, a platform using the power of the internet to facilitate embryo transfers between people who want to know something about each other — donors with frozen embryos often left over from IVF and recipients such as Kilcullen.
“It’s not like they’re sitting on a clinic waitlist where just the next available embryo is theirs,” said Gina Davis, a genetic counselor who cofounded the company. “There’s really some choice about, do we kind of align? Are our families similar? Do we have similar values?”
Kilcullen said she had a meeting with her embryo donors over Zoom, which felt “like the biggest job interview” of her life.
The donors ended up giving all 10 of their embryos to Kilcullen.
“I had some reservations knowing that she wasn’t genetically mine, and would that feel any different? But no, the minute she was placed on my chest, it was, yeah, the best thing ever,” Kilcullen said.
Gina Davis and her husband had 17 remaining embryos after their own fertility journey. At the time, she said she had to use Facebook to find someone to donate the embryos to due to limited options.
“When I first started thinking about donating my embryos, most of the programs throughout the country were basically anonymous. The model had been really closed, that you would just donate your embryos and you don’t know where they go,” Davis told CBS News. “We thought children deserve to know their genetic origins, and their families deserve to know a little bit more about their origin story.”
The idea to remove anonymity from the embryo donation process has given Kilcullen exactly what she needed when deciding how to become a mom.
“I just really wanted Marlowe to grow up knowing who the genetic family are, and it’s an extended family, which I think is beautiful for us and for them. They’ve entered that world as my child, but they were made with love from theirs,” Kilcullen said.
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