In a recent exchange on X, Hannah Strege, “the world’s very first snowflake baby” was told by @RoryLS, “There’s no such thing as ‘embryo adoption.’ Embryos are property, not people. You were not ‘adopted’ as an embryo, you were donated property. You might as well argue that a pebble has human rights.” Hannah’s story as “Snowflake #1” has been told in various media outlets.
She was born in December of 1998, but she had been conceived far earlier, deemed a “leftover” or “excess” embryo from an IVF process. Her parents, who were struggling with infertility, sought the counsel of Christian leaders about the ethics of adopting embryos and giving them a chance to be born and live life outside of the freezer.
As she put it in an article: “I was a frozen embryo, one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of them at the time, created via an in vitro fertilization industry unregulated and out of control. But I was fortunate. I was the first frozen embryo ever adopted. Before I had a name, I was assigned a number, not an identity.” IVF has created a moral crisis.
There are now as many as 1.5 million frozen embryos in the U.S. alone. Many of these will remain frozen or simply tossed out. In the UK alone, an estimated 130,000 embryos have been thrown in the trash since 1991. At the heart of the crisis, a crisis made worse by the normalization of IVF and other artificial reproductive technologies, is what Hannah Strege noted in her response to the X user: “And there it is.
When your defense of IVF requires looking at a living human being and saying ‘you were property,’ you may want to reconsider which side of the ethical argument you’re standing on. I was never property. I