Snowflakes Fund Ending, Agencies Livid UPDATED

Nightlight Christian Adoptions and Bethany Christian Services, JCICS and NCFA agencies, are not happy that the program will NOT be renewed in FY2013. Expect to see a frenzy of marketing over the next year.

Did you even know the taxpayer dollars were funding this? Apparently to the tune of $2 Million per year!

“President Barack Obama is seeking to end federal funding for a pro-life program installed during the administration of President George W. Bush that helped save unborn babies potentially slated for destruction in fertility clinics.

The “snowflake baby” program provided funding for adoption programs for the children who were formerly stored human embryos at fertility clinics who could have been destroyed for scientific research.

Congressman Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, was one of the strong proponents of the pro-life program, saying, “Assertions that leftover embryos are better off dead so that their stem cells can be derived is dehumanizing and cheapens human life. There is no such thing as leftover human life. Ask the snowflake children— cryogenically frozen embryos who were adopted—their lives are precious and priceless.”

The Obama administration proposes to defund the Embryo Adoption Awareness Campaign in its fiscal 2013 budget. As the Washington Times reports, “The Department of Health and Human Services “is not requesting funds for this program” because “the Embryo Adoption program will be discontinued in FY2013,” HHS officials said in a February funding report to Congress.”

Ron Stoddart, executive director of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, one of the top embryo adoption programs, told the newspaper he is disappointed with the decision, saying, “I think that daily we talk to people about … embryo donation and adoption, and we hear the response, ‘Really? I didn’t know that was even possible.’”

Mailee Smith, staff counsel at Americans United for Life, told the newspaper the decision is more evidence of “the pro-abortion slant of this administration.”

“Why would the Obama administration cut $2 million for adoption awareness, but keep $1 million a day for Planned Parenthood?” she said.

But the Obama administration claims there is “little interest” in the program.

Under one of the grants the program gave out, Bethany Christian Services, the largest adoption agency in the United States, partnered with the NEDC to provide a national forum for emerging issues related to embryo adoption and donation.

Jeffrey Keenan, MD, medical director for the National Embryo Donation Center, said the grants will also help his organization create a national clearinghouse for literature, media and electronic data currently available on embryo adoption and donation.

“We are pleased with the exciting work previous grants have allowed us to accomplish in increasing awareness about this important option for infertile couples, and we look forward to maintaining our leadership in this field,” Keenan said.

President Bush stood with the families of several babies who were born after embryo adoption when he vetoed a Congressional bill forcing taxpayers to pay for destructive embryonic stem cell research.

Known as “snowflake children” — each child is unique, like a snowflake — these babies adopted as human embryos are now healthy children no different from their peers.

“These families highlight the essential fact that human embryos are human beings deserving the full love and protections granted any child,” said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

“We hear so often in the debate over embryonic stem cells that the harvesting of stem cells from embryos does not destroy a human life, and yet these Snowflake children prove otherwise,” Perkins explained.

There are an estimated 400,000 frozen human embryos in fertility clinics across the country. A study in September 2004 by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University indicates that 84 percent of clinics throw out “extra” embryos created during in in-vitro procedures.

The study showed that 76 percent of clinics offered the adoption option; 60 percent, disposal of the embryos before freezing; 54 percent, disposal after freezing; 60 percent, donation for scientific experimentation; and 19 percent, donation for training doctors.

Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) says the Nightlight Christian Adoptions program is a way to “take these little children and give them the potential to live the rest of their lives as the gifts from God that they are.”

Obama: End Funding for Snowflake Embryo Adoption Program
[Life News 3/5/12 by Steve Ertelt]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Stoddart, an adoption attorney in California, pioneered the concept of embryo adoption in 1997 after becoming executive director of Nightlight.

That year, he heard a radio report about the impending destruction of 5,000 leftover frozen embryos in the United Kingdom.

“I remember thinking, ‘Embryos … those are babies, not just sperm and eggs. That’s not right,'” Stoddart said. “It was an uncomfortable feeling.”

A couple he was working with at the time had been offered leftover embryos by a fertility clinic that had created them through in vitro fertilization for another couple who no longer wanted them.

In vitro fertilization, a common infertility method used when others fail, involves fertilizing a human egg outside the body and implanting it in a woman’s uterus.

Because the success rate can be low, many embryos typically are created in the lab and frozen for future use.

Stoddart said the lab wouldn’t allow any exchange of information between the donor couple and the couple who would receive the embryos, so the exchange didn’t happen.

“I started thinking more about that,” he said. His idea was to “treat the donor family the way you would a birth mother” in an adoption, allowing the couple to choose an adoptive family and to treat the couple on the receiving end as an adoptive family.

The Snowflakes program was created, and its first adopted baby, a girl named Hannah, was born Dec. 31, 1998.

600,000 Frozen Embryos

Nightlight’s Snowflakes program was the first, but now several other organizations offer embryo adoption services.

Although relatively few people are aware of it, the stockpile of frozen embryos presents a major problem that’s getting bigger, said Kimberly Tyson, Nightlight’s marketing and program director and the director since 2007 of the Embryo Adoption Awareness Center in Loveland.

She said about 600,000 embryos are sitting in cold-storage facilities across the country, and the number is growing by 4 percent a year.

Since 2002, the center has received a number of federal grants through the Embryo Adoption Awareness Campaign, which was instituted during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Typically, the center in Loveland has received about $500,000 a year, Stoddart said.

“If there are no grants, there really is no other source of funding,” Stoddart said.

He acknowledged that federal spending needs to be cut in many places but added, “We believe that a life-affirming education program is a good thing to do.”

He is constrained from lobbying for the funding, but he said he hopes “some senator or representative believes the same thing and writes it back in.”

Stoddart said the embryo adoption awareness activities are kept separate from the Snowflakes program, which is based in California.

The funding pays for five employees, including Tyson, and also is used for video production, webinars, print and online advertising, and maintenance of the website embryoadoption.org.

Tyson said she works to educate the nation’s 500 fertility clinics, 1,500 adoption agencies, physicians and counselors who work with infertile couples.

The Embryo Adoption Awareness Center lists eight different embryo adoption programs on its website.

“Our goal is to be a provider-neutral center to promote embryo adoption throughout the United States,” Stoddart said.

Finding a Match

As a result of increased awareness, Tyson said she has seen a “significant shift” in the attitudes of couples who have extra embryos and don’t know what to do with them.

As they consider adoption, “they are particularly interested in being able to choose the family,” she said.

Nightlight has the genetic parents and the potential adoptive families fill out profiles to help both sides make a decision.

And although Nightlight treats the transfer of embryos as an adoption, it technically is just an exchange of property under the law, Tyson said.

No termination of parental rights or adoption decree is required, Stoddart said, although some families do go through those formalities in court.

“But this is an adoption from the standpoint of how you’re bringing the child into your household,” he said.

The agency encourages openness between the families, and it advocates telling the adopted child.

“You want the child to know growing up that’s their story,” he said.

At get-togethers of “snowflake” families, “the children talk about it,” Stoddart said. “They say, ‘What snowflake number are you?'”

And the snowflake name fits the program perfectly, Stoddart said: “Snowflakes are frozen; each one is unique and is a gift from heaven.”

“I wrote a profile about us,” she said. “It was great because it allowed me to think about and express the kind of family I would hope they would have.”

The agency in turn gave her profiles of prospective adoptive couples. As an adopted child herself, she said one thing that was important to her was that the family would agree to keep in touch and let her know once a year how her child or children were doing after the adoption.

“I didn’t want to bother them,” she said, “just a picture, a note: ‘we’re good, here he or she is.'”

The first family she and her husband were matched with didn’t want such an arrangement, so she didn’t agree to the match. “I didn’t want to have that hole in my history on both ends,” she said.

Then Snowflakes sent her another profile, and she said she immediately called the agency and said, “‘Get them for me.’ I really felt good about them.”

Two years ago, the adoptive mom gave birth to a little boy from one of Broadway’s embryos.

And since then, “the mother and I have become very, very close friends.” Although they’ve never met in person, Broadway said they touch base every week or two.

“I love her. She’s an angel. We thank each other profusely. It’s been a wonderful experience.” [Is that the child’s experience or YOUR experience? I think we know the answer to that.]

Broadway said some of her friends ask her how she can live with the knowledge that she has a child “out there.”

Her response: “How could I live with myself throwing them away?

“There’s not been one day that I regret it. Not at all.”

‘Proud Parents to 12 Snowflake Babies’
On the other side of the issue, Jennifer Wright and her husband, Todd, always had been interested in adopting children.

When the Phoenix-area couple realized that medical conditions prevented them from conceiving, they turned to embryo adoption. Between the two of them, she said, the only “reproductive part” that works is her uterus, and that’s what the frozen embryos need. “It was a no-brainer for us,” she said on her blog about embryo adoption.

The Wrights adopted 12 embryos through Nightlight Christian Adoptions’ Snowflakes program from a woman she had met online through a Christian infertility group. On their third try, after losing five babies to miscarriage, she gave birth to their son, Matthew, on Jan. 22, 2011.

[Ah…a 16.66 % success rate. I guess that is better than traditional adoption success rates. Whoopeee!]

Jennifer Wright writes extensively on her Snowflake Family blog and has become an outspoken advocate for embryo adoption. She said she and her husband never have experienced a negative reaction from people who learn about their experience.

“The biggest reaction we get from people is confusion, like, ‘What?'” she said in an interview Friday, “and others think it’s cool.”

The family who placed their embryos for adoption with the Wrights have three children from the same in vitro fertilization set, Wright said, so Matthew already has three siblings. And the Wrights plan to try for another snowflake baby next year from their remaining six embryos.

[Ah…gambling for one out of six again, huh?]

At some point, she said, they likely will try traditional adoption as well.

Wright said they don’t intend to keep the details of Matthew’s origins from him. “It’s important to us that he know the truth,” she said.

“We will always tell him his story.”