Stem Cell Research Adds to Debate Over Embryos
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: The booming fertility industry in the U.S. has produced a medical and a moral dilemma, what to do with all those frozen embryos that are stored in clinics all around the country. It turns out there are even more of them than previously thought. Our medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is here with more of our "Daily Dose" of health news.</s>ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN ANCHOR: It turns out there's a lot more than had been previously thought. It turns out there are approximately 400,000 frozen embryos in clinics around the United States. This is a survey of several hundred fertility clinics, and there was another surprising finding. They found that in fact not many of those are actually left over. In other words, while there are 400,000, which is twice as more than previously had been thought, most of those are actually intended to produce a pregnancy. Let's look at the numbers, out of those 400,000, 87 percent are for patients, so that they can start a pregnancy. Three percent are intended for research, 2 percent are awaiting destruction, and that's at the request of the parents, 2 percent are awaiting donation to another family, so they can hopefully be used to start a pregnancy for somebody else, and 4 percent fall into the other category. For example, the mom and dad got divorced, and so the clinic doesn't know what to do with them. And so what's interesting about that, again, is that most of them are there for the parents to start a pregnancy. But it does mean that there is that, you know, many thousands of embryos that are left, that are left over, so to speak, after the parents have already had the pregnancy they want, moral dilemma. No one -- we will never really get agreement on what to do with those? Are they life? Are they not life?</s>KAGAN: Well, and at this point, I guess it's up to the individual parents about what to do with these. Is there a guideline? Is there a way? We were talking about this? I have friends that have gone through this. They've had their children, but they feel like they don't have guidance. They do want to donate those to stem cell research, or perhaps in another direction.</s>COHEN: Right, what fertility clinics do with parents, like your friends, is even as they are starting the process, they say, OK, we're about to do this, there's a very good chance that you're going to end up with frozen embryos, and that's what you see in those sort of straws there, those are frozen embryos, and you need to think about what you want to do with them. Do you want to donate them for scientific research? Do you want to donate them to another family, so that they can start a pregnancy? Do you just want to keep them frozen for years and years and years, which is what a lot of people decide to do with them, and it's a very hard decision. It's also a hard thing for these clinics to offer guidance on, because it's such a personal decision. A person's religion would play into this, obviously, very heavily. So it's hard to tell people, here is what you want to do, this is what we think you ought to do.</s>KAGAN: But I guess there's probably even more people out there with that decision facing them than we thought. Elizabeth Cohen, thank you, Elizabeth. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com