Embryos to donate

[juddiv]

First off apologies for the super long message.

I have 10 frozen embryos.... these were created as I got breast cancer when I was 29 and it was before I had started a family.

To try and be brief the cancer I had has no genetic element... rather completely random and not hormone related either. I am now 40 years old and we have two girls thankfully conceived naturally.

We never needed to turn to IVF in the end as my fertility was fortunately unaffected by the chemotherapy.

Anyway our family is now complete and we wanted to donate our embryos. We went through the donation process with the NHS but they have turned us down.

Essentially the lead clinician decided that because my breast cancer was early any offspring we have has a moderate risk of cancer. To put this in perspective the general population has a risk of 11% and moderate risk is 17%.
Due to this 6% increase we have been rejected as donors. We are pretty devastated and don't know what to do next.

Our storage expires in December 2018 and we have no idea if we can donate our embryos outside of the NHS.

We are desperate to give them viability if possible, to see life produced from horrendous circumstances and joy brought to someone's life. Our two girls are beautiful and healthy and they make our world better in every way, it seems such a shame that we can't help another couple with our embryos.

Does anyone know where we should go or who we can contact?
Thanks in advance
J

I would like to quickly add ... I guess a lot of people might not want our embryos given my medical history- I guess I'd like people's opinions about whether it's worth us pursuing the potential to donate or not?
So I'm very thick skinned - please don't worry about saying what you think about this 👍🏼

Hi Juddiv

I've just come across your post and I know it was posted ages ago & I just wondered if you had got anywhere? I have stage 4 cancer which is classed as in remission & fully managed for 2 years through a miracle treatment which I can't stop to carry a child so myself & my DH are currently undergoing IVF to try & transfer our embryo to my best friend as a surrogate for us so it struck a chord as if our 2 embryos either don't survive the thaw or fail to implant either now or on go 2 then we don't know if I can get another treatment break to try to get more eggs (I wasn't eligible to have mine harvested prior to treatment) or need to use donor eggs.

I'm not necessarily saying we would like them as we don't know but I certainly understand you don't want them going to waste & we are on a surrogacy forum where many people use 'traditional surrogates' where it's the surrogates egg that is used so people who have been trying for 10 years or more (which some have who then turn to surrogacy as a lady resort) may be very open to using embryos who bear no genetic chain to them. Have you spoken to your clinic on the implications of trying to "privately donate them" as that would be the ethical fear with such a scenario? You would have to relinquish all right to them & legally that could be a mine field? I think you'd have to ask "if we found someone who wanted to use our embryos what could we do" before asking further but maybe a hypothetical question in one of the surrogacy groups not let them go to waste, or certainly we understand that your cancer does not pose much risk & would be happy with it as I am like that myself!

But we are waiting another 3 or 4 weeks to find out if ours works

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