In reality, the options available to you vary greatly depending on where you are. And many of them lead to limbo.
Giuliana Baccino, managing director of New Life Bank, an egg and sperm storage facility in Buenos Aires, takes Spain, Europe’s birth capital, as an example. He says this is partly because IVF is much cheaper here than in other Western European countries. Argentina, Vice President of the European Fertility Association. Operating costs are low and competition is strong. There are approximately 330 IVF clinics operating in Spain. (For comparison, there are about 500 IVF clinics in the United States, with a population nearly seven times larger.)
Baccino, who lives in Madrid, says she often hears stories about foreign patients in their late 40s who created eight or nine embryos for IVF in Spain but ended up using only one or two of them. They return to their home country to have the babies, she says, and the embryos remain in Spain. These people often do not return to get the remaining embryos, either because they have completed their family or because they no longer qualify for IVF (Spanish clinics tend not to offer treatment to people over 50).
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In 2023, the Spanish Fertility Society estimated that there were 668,082 embryos in storage in Spain, of which approximately 60,000 were in an “abandoned state.” In these cases, the hospital may not be able to contact or receive clear instructions from the intended parents, or may not want to destroy the embryos in case the patient requests to do so at a later date. But Spanish hospitals are wary of discarding embryos, even if they have permission to do so, says Baccino. “We’re always trying to avoid problems,” she says. “And we end up having embryos in this black hole.”
This also happens with American embryos. Clinics may lose contact with patients, and patients may move elsewhere after completing their families or forget about their remaining embryos. Others may put off making a decision about those embryos and stop communicating with the hospital. In these cases, hospitals tend to store embryos and cover storage costs themselves.
Nowadays, clinics ask patients to sign a contract that includes terms for long-term storage and disposal of the embryos. But even if you have them, it may be easier for hospitals to leave the embryos in place indefinitely. “Lawmakers are wary of disposing of them without explicit consent because of the potential liability,” says Cattapan, who has researched the issue. “People invest so much time, energy and money into creating these embryos. “What if they come back?”
Bortoletto’s clinic has been in operation for 35 years and, he says, has a total of more than 47,000 embryos stored across the handful of sites it operates in the United States. “The oldest embryo in storage was frozen in 1989,” he added.
Some people may not even know where their embryos are. Sam Everingham, who founded and runs Growing Families, an organization that provides advice on surrogacy and cross-border donation, traveled to India with his partner from their home in Melbourne, Australia, in 2009 to find egg donors and surrogate mothers. “It was the Wild West back then,” he recalls. Everingham and his partner used donor eggs to create eight embryos with sperm.
