“You know what the fertility sector needs a touch more of? Humanity.” This is the first line of the article covering a marketing campaign by a NY-based IVF clinic. And I couldn’t agree more!

Let’s bring some humanity to IVF by:

1) Recognizing that embryos (aka: fertilized egg, pre-embryo, 2PN, zygote, morula, blastocyst) are human beings. It would be helpful if the clinics could clearly educate their patients on this topic prior to starting an IVF cycle.

2) Stop killing human beings in the lab. “Discard” means removing a living embryo (human being) from either the incubator or cryopreservation and killing it by bringing it to room temperature, but not transferring it to a woman’s uterus.

3) Stop throwing these arrested embryos (human beings) out as medical waste.

Furthermore, this article shares that since 2006, more than 8000 babies have been born as a result of the clinic’s work. Let’s estimate that 50% of these embryos were conceived from fresh, non-donor cycles. This would mean that in order for 4000 babies to be live born, 56,000 human beings were created, 33,600 died in the lab and 12,000 died post transfer. These are my calculations. I hope someone would prove I’m wrong.