Baby Business: Embyros for Sale!

There is a new option for women or couples looking to get pregnant: making a withdraw from an embryo bank.

NPR reports that a company in San Antonio, Texas-the Abraham Center of Life-- is home to the world's first embryo bank, which will provide embryos to infertile couples as an alternative to adoption. This has raised legal and ethical questions.

Jennalee Ryan has been running her adoption agency, the Abraham Center for 20 years and says that adding the embryo bank is one more way to help people have children. Ryan told NPR that while she is labeled as having the first embryo bank, but "it's a bank without anything in it," she said.

Ryan adds that the reason there is nothing in the bank is because as the embryos become available, there are just like that taken. She says that anxious parents-to-be are in fact lining up for the services.

Ryan found a young woman willing to donate her eggs and purchased sperm over the internet, and Voila! You get an embryo.

The embryos at the Abraham Center cost $2500 which goes toward the costs of services, including the donor fee, medications and other fees.

Sounds good, right? Some ethicists are arguing that it isn't. George Annas from Boston University tells NPR that paying for an embryo is not the same thing as paying for eggs and sperm. He says that ethically, embryos should be treated different than a sperm and egg when they are separated. When they are together, he calls it a "unique construct."

Ryan says that she is not technically selling embryos, but the services of providing them. However, Annas was quoted in the NPR interview as saying, "It's too close to buying and selling children, which I hope no one would ever be for."

He adds that embryos could turn into some commodity that you shop for, rather than a potential human being.

Aside from ethics, there are also some legal questions this subject brings up-just who do these embryos belong to. Fertility clinic experts say that once an embryo is created, parents usually have the rights to it. But this case is unique, as the embryos are created prior to parents getting them- and neither the sperm nor egg donor intended to be a parent.

Ryan says that her embryo bank owns all the embryos once they are created. She explains that until the embryo is transferred to the prospective mother at a fertility clinic, her company owns it-just like scientists own embryos used for stem-cell research.

Ryan says that two women have thus far gotten pregnant using embryos she arranged to have created.