My Frozen Embryos – A Complicated Love Story
Anyone who has struggled to conceive knows that the reproductive journey can be a long, emotional, and costly ride. It leaves many people with scars and bruises - physically and psychologically - that impact their future decisions in a multitude of ways.
Alex Holder explores how her own IVF experience has left her feeling about a collection of eight frozen embryos and why it’s complicated.
In the financial district of Lisbon, in an unassuming office block, sealed in a liquid nitrogen freezer, tucked up in their beds, are my eight embryos.
They are the result of the fertility treatment I had during the summer of 2020. My partner and I had been trying – and failing – for our second child for over two years when we turned to IVF. We began our first round during a Portuguese heatwave, and through sweaty car journeys back and forth to the clinic and tens of injections, we made two embryos. Both went back in, but after a joyous pregnancy test, it ended in an early miscarriage, and we found ourselves back to square one with no ‘spare’ embryos in the freezer.
It was then that the madness of infertility took over. I became obsessed with getting as many eggs out of my body as possible while I was as young as possible. I didn’t want to miscarry again without there being some embryos on ice, so I chose to undergo two egg collections back-to-back. Egg collection isn’t a light procedure, it requires loading your body with hormones so you produce more eggs than normal, the monitoring process includes a multitude of internal scans, the legs in stirrups kind which is often performed when you’re on your period; and then the eggs are taken out under general anaesthetic while wearing nothing but a hairnet and a backless gown.
We were lucky, under the watchful eye of our embryologist, a fine fingered man called Ricardo, those two egg collections produced another ten embryos. Eight of them are in the freezer, one of them is sleeping in a cot next to me and one disintegrated somewhere in my uterus.
Although invisible to the eye, these embryos are fully formed blueprints for the humans they could become. I don’t know if they are boys or girls, I don’t know if they have chromosomal abnormalities (statistically at least half of them do) but I picture them daily. It is already decided what colour their eyes are, whether their thumbnails will be pitted, and if the hair at the crown of their heads will swirl clockwise. It is already decided, but I will never know because I will never meet them. I often torture myself with the question – what if my daughter was still in the freezer? What if Ricardo had chosen another embryo that day instead?
“I often torture myself with the question – what if my daughter was still in the freezer? What if Ricardo had chosen another embryo that day instead?”
Perhaps it’s the pain they took to make, but even though I have no plans to use my embryos to get pregnant again I’m not ready to let them go, or as the clinic puts it, ‘thaw and perish’. They keep me safe, safe from the agonising failure of infertility and the small possibility I’ll wake up next year broody as hell. They’re also a morbid backup in case my children die. And anyway, I love them.
“They feel part of my daughter somehow,” says B who conceived her only child through IVF and has two embryos in the freezer. B is “definitely finished having children,” although she can’t let go of the embryos. “They don’t feel like my babies, but they do feel precious. They feel like blood sweat and many tears. They feel like ten grand.” I remind her that keeping them on ice costs money too, “Yes, we thought IVF was expensive. This is where the real money-making happens.”
“They don’t feel like my babies, but they do feel precious.”
My three rounds of IVF totalled around £15,000, considerably cheaper in Lisbon than London but still an enormous amount of money. I ask my partner what we’ll do with them when we get that letter, the one where the clinic will ask for money (£450 approx) to keep them frozen for another two years. The options are clear: keep, destroy, donate to another parent, donate to science or use them to try and get pregnant. My partner feels it would be easier, mentally, to thaw and not have the option to have more children, “we’re happy,” he says, “why torture ourselves?”
A friend, M, explained why she thawed her embryos after conceiving her daughter via IVF, “There was a tension in knowing they existed while also knowing it was really unlikely I’d use them which I found difficult, like being stuck in limbo. It was like being on a diet and knowing there’s a bar of chocolate in the fridge; A constant niggling presence and a drain on my energy. While I was sad to close the door on the possibility, it was much easier to march into the future without the baggage.”
Until last year, the UK law stated a ten-year storage limit on eggs [gametes] and embryos, but this has recently been reviewed and changed to a maximum of 55 years, which means plausibly I could still have the option to procreate into my nineties. I’m pro-choice, so my indecision isn’t wrapped up with my concern for any embryo dying, I think without them I’ll feel infertile again and I never want to be back there.
Yet their existence makes our infertility journey feel unresolved. I got the ultimate prize, I have the baby, so why do I dread the day my embryos don’t exist in the world? Do I really love them too much to thaw them? I won’t know until that letter arrives. Realistically, when they’re gone it won’t make any difference to my day-to-day life, like a celebrity dying, I’ll just know they’re not there.