What terms can be included in an open embryo donation contract? Anything the donor(s) and recipient(s) both agree will work for their families. In our case, my wife and I made sure we worked out our concerns with the recipients before hand. By writing emails back and forth and discussing things on the phone we had all arrived at a general framework for the agreement before the actual contract was written.
After sharing our concerns and hopes we then stepped back and trusted our recipients to keep to the spirit of what we had discussed. Only the most important issues made it into the actual draft contract.
The legally binding contract was kept flexible and as minimal as possible. The only things we asked the recipients to commit to were issues that I felt would put me into "karmic debt" if something went wrong.
By "karmic debt" I mean that I did not want to be responsible for causing pain. Thus, I would not help anyone create a child who was needlessly disabled, deceived or a member of a family whose values conflicted with what I consider essentially moral. Parents planning to lie to their children about their conception with donor egg/sperm were out. Heterosexual couples, whose options for starting a family were so broad compared to gay parents, were not the recipients for me. I also ruled out single moms because I know how hard it is to care for an infant when a parent does not have a partner.
Still, I had been convinced to change what I originally considered essential recipient criteria by the wonderful child-centered attitude of the couple I ultimately chose. Though I had at first wanted the children to be raised Jewish, in accordance with their bloodline, Jenny and Erin were magnificent, good-hearted people who had a lot of love to give a child. They would pass along the right values even without the benefit of millennia of Jewish wisdom (and with more humility than I could muster).
Shedding criteria that were not essential did not mean abandoning my core values. I still wanted a child from this donation to have the right to know his or her origins, both ethnically and genetically. I wanted to make sure the clinic could not pressure the recipients to implant multiple embryos at once, causing them to exponentially increase their risk of having disabled twins or triplets. And if the recipients changed their minds, I wanted the unused embryos back so they went to another family who also met my concerns.
Jenny and Erin had been so open and flexible but now we were down to brass tacks. I included as few terms in the proposed contract as I possibly could but I was still asking a lot. As we waited to hear their response, I wondered if I had over-stepped. My wife and I had accepted them, but would they accept us? I really liked these women, and I hoped their answer would be "yes".
Monday, February 5, 2007
Sunday, February 4, 2007
HELLO
Now that we had decided to give our embryos to Jenny and Erin we invited them to speak to us on the phone. They admitted to being nervous about this. I could understand that. This was life, actively happening. Nonetheless, they gave us their home and mobile numbers.
To make sure we didn't surprise them, we asked Jenny and Erin for a good time to call them, and that's when we called. They were both very sweet on the phone, and their Southern accents sounded musical to my Northern ears.
We talked to them in detail about every possible medical problem anyone in my family had ever experienced, including dandruff. We wanted to make sure they knew what they were getting into.
At the same time, we covered the basics of what they needed to do for us to sign over the embryos. We had already mentioned most of these things to them and they had said they were open to them, but we wanted to spell it out all at once.
Those requirements were:
1) Use our fertility clinic, since it has the nation's best success rates, and to avoid shipping the fragile embryos.
2) Pay our lawyer to draft the donation contract, as she is a pioneer in fertility law.
3) Tell any children they have that they are genetically Jewish, conceived with donor gametes and have the right, when adults, to meet their egg donor/genetic sibs.
4) Send us a photo, medical update and developmental summary on their kid(s) once a year.
5) Reimburse us for the embryo storage fees.
6) Use the embryos within 10 years.
7) Give back any embryos they do not choose to use.
8) Don't blame us if you don't get pregnant or the kid(s) have problems.
and the biggie:
9) Agree to thaw only one embryo to start. If the embryologist says that one doesn't look viable, thaw a second one, then, if needed, a third. But stop after one viable embryo is produced to reduce the risk of twins or triplets and the huge likelihood of problems from a multiple pregnancy.
We had tried to be as flexible as we could. We did not want to force the recipients to meet capricious demands. But I considered it my responsibility to make sure I did not force a child to endure needless disability due to prematurity or unhappiness from discovering later that they had been lied to about their genetic origins. I also wanted to keep my own children safe by learning about any medical problems that might arise with their genetic siblings. And after spending tens of thousands of dollars to create my own children, I thought it was fair for the recipients to at least pay the fees that allowed the embryos to wait for them in the freezer.
Would the recipients see this as reasonable? We waited to find out.
To make sure we didn't surprise them, we asked Jenny and Erin for a good time to call them, and that's when we called. They were both very sweet on the phone, and their Southern accents sounded musical to my Northern ears.
We talked to them in detail about every possible medical problem anyone in my family had ever experienced, including dandruff. We wanted to make sure they knew what they were getting into.
At the same time, we covered the basics of what they needed to do for us to sign over the embryos. We had already mentioned most of these things to them and they had said they were open to them, but we wanted to spell it out all at once.
Those requirements were:
1) Use our fertility clinic, since it has the nation's best success rates, and to avoid shipping the fragile embryos.
2) Pay our lawyer to draft the donation contract, as she is a pioneer in fertility law.
3) Tell any children they have that they are genetically Jewish, conceived with donor gametes and have the right, when adults, to meet their egg donor/genetic sibs.
4) Send us a photo, medical update and developmental summary on their kid(s) once a year.
5) Reimburse us for the embryo storage fees.
6) Use the embryos within 10 years.
7) Give back any embryos they do not choose to use.
8) Don't blame us if you don't get pregnant or the kid(s) have problems.
and the biggie:
9) Agree to thaw only one embryo to start. If the embryologist says that one doesn't look viable, thaw a second one, then, if needed, a third. But stop after one viable embryo is produced to reduce the risk of twins or triplets and the huge likelihood of problems from a multiple pregnancy.
We had tried to be as flexible as we could. We did not want to force the recipients to meet capricious demands. But I considered it my responsibility to make sure I did not force a child to endure needless disability due to prematurity or unhappiness from discovering later that they had been lied to about their genetic origins. I also wanted to keep my own children safe by learning about any medical problems that might arise with their genetic siblings. And after spending tens of thousands of dollars to create my own children, I thought it was fair for the recipients to at least pay the fees that allowed the embryos to wait for them in the freezer.
Would the recipients see this as reasonable? We waited to find out.
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