Mom of ‘snowflake baby’ raises awareness of frozen embryos

This past week, the National Day of Prayer Task Force held its annual prayer summit for prayer leaders from all over America who gathered in Colorado Springs to pray for the nation.

Many of the speakers presented the rampant problems in our country that are in need of prayer, but Maria Lancaster brought her answer to prayer up on the stage with her.

She introduced her 6-year-old daughter Elisha to the crowd, and the impossibly cute little girl chatted a bit about the important things in her life, such as her stuffed bunny. After a while, Maria asked her to sit with “Miss Lisa” because mommy needed to talk to the audience for a few minutes.

Maria then told us that her daughter was an adopted “snowflake baby.”

She explained that when couples do fertility treatments, their excess unused embryos are put into a freezer. Her daughter, Maria said, had been frozen for four years before she was taken out of the freezer in Florida, flown by FedEx to Washington State, and then implanted within Maria.

Nine months after being taken from the freezer, Maria’s daughter was born, and now, six years after that, Elisha was onstage in Colorado in her pink and white pinafore dress-and-sweater set, talking to us about her stuffed bunny. She was the 35th snowflake baby born in the U.S.

Maria told us that an enormous number of frozen embryos are just sitting in fertility clinic freezers all across the country. Like snowflakes, every one of them is totally unique, but hundreds of thousands of these little girls and boys are waiting to be adopted, unfrozen, and born.

After couples have finished their in vitro fertilization (IVF) process to complete their own families, there may be excess embryos that were created but not needed for their IVF. Many fertility clinics freeze and store the embryos at their facility for an annual fee. Those couples are given choices about the future for their remaining embryos: adoption, destruction, donation, research or leave them frozen.

As more and more couples do the IVF fertility process, the number of remaining embryos continues to grow. Each year when a couple receives their annual storage fee invoice, they are once again faced with the difficult decision of what to do with those embryos.

On her Web site is a video of Maria, her husband Jeff, and Elisha. In that video Maria makes this compelling point:

“One of the things that we’ve realized through this process, is that because she had basically been held in suspended animation in two cells in a freezer, we’ve become acutely aware that life must begin at conception if a life could be conceived and held frozen for four years in a freezer and then just given a warm womb to grow in and turn into a human being.”

The implications of that overwhelming, incredible thought would not escape Maria, and she began a ministry in her church called Embryo Adoption of Cedar Park. Its Web site is
adoptanembryo.net.

Embryo adoption, Maria says, is a solution for those couples who have embryos remaining in limbo after fertility treatments. It is a wonderful solution, she says, for other couples who have not been able to conceive on their own.

And, Maria points out, “Embryo adoption gets someone out of the freezer!”

Sharman’s column appears each Tuesday.