Woman Implanted with Wrong Embryo, Carolyn Savage, Selfish: Already Has Three Kids

Carolyn Savage, 40, was implanted with the wrong embryo and is 35 weeks pregnant. The fertility clinic that Carolyn and Sean Savage relied upon accidentally implanted the wrong embryo into Carolyn. Sean Savage stated, "They delivered the worst news of our life," to Meredith Vieira of TODAY. Meanwhile, my brother and sister-in-law have only one child, age 4, and have since been struggling to have a second child.

I wonder if in my brother's and sister-in-law's eyes, the "worst news" of one's life is finding out that despite having three healthy kids already, that fourth embryo is not genetically yours. Don't get me wrong: I can understand the anger and emotional turmoil that Carolyn and Sean Savage must be going through. But the way the MSN article, titled, "Woman Implanted with Wrong Embryo to Give Birth," starts out, will have the reader assuming that Carolyn and Sean Savage have NO children!

In fact, as I began reading, "Woman Implanted with Wrong Embryo...," I truly felt bad for Carolyn Savage, and I was immediately pulled into this heart wrenching story of such enormous negligence on the part of the fertility clinic. "How could they have implanted the wrong embryo!" I kept thinking.

And then I got to the part that says Carolyn and Sean Savage already have three children, including an infant! WTF ? The Savages, from Ohio, have decided to carry the baby to term and promptly hand him over to his genetic parents, whom we can't exactly forget about in this outrageous story.

The biological mother gets off scot free in all this: no morning sickness, back pain, swelling body, weight gain or agonizing labor pains; though I wonder if the biological mother feels grossly cheated out of not experiencing a pregnancy and even labor pains excruciating enough to make women holler.

The bigger issue here, in this saga of a woman implanted with the wrong embryo, is that not only did Carolyn and Sean Savage already have three healthy kids, but the last two pregnancies created life-threatening complications for Carolyn. Despite that, they just weren't satisfied with three pregnancies and three kids, and wanted to go for a fourth. Plus, the Savages' doctor warned them that this next in vitro attempt was to be the absolute last, because Carolyn Savage's body was good for only one more pregnancy!

Thus, after giving birth to someone else's genetic baby, the Savages will have a surrogate mother carry their next child. But the story of the woman implanted with the wrong embryo gets creepier, because the Savages' original plan was to have Carolyn implanted with FIVE embryos! These five embryos were leftovers from the fertility treatment that resulted in the Savages' third child, Mary Kate, the infant.

The Savages' religious beliefs bar them from destroying embryos, so the plan was to have all five embryos implanted, with the hope that "one would take." Ahem, but ... wasn't this Octomom's plan? Octomom wanted all six of her leftover embryos implanted so that she could have just one more child, and the world knows how that panned out! Were the Savages, already with three kids including a baby, prepared for the possibility of quintuplets or even more, since implanted embryos can split and create more babies?

On the other hand, implanting five embryos at once puts them all at risk, and chances are high that a few will miscarry. Isn't this a form of "destroying embryos"? If Carolyn and Sean Savage had any common sense at all, they would have arranged to have had just two of their leftover embryos implanted, and then, assuming that those two went full-term, arranged to have the remaining three embryos given to two other infertile women. This plan would have maximized the odds of all five embryos going full-term!

"We felt strongly that we needed to give every embryo that we created a chance at life," said Carolyn Savage. Yes, go figure! You don't give every embryo "a chance at life" when you have all five put inside you! Of course, this isn't what ultimately happened, because the clinic implanted the wrong embryo into Carolyn Savage. But that's beside the point! Obviously, the Savages could not have predicted that a fertility clinic would implant the wrong embryo.

The genetic parents will be present during the birth, and the Savages are working with an attorney regarding arranging for a surrogate to carry the remaining embryos, though it has not been disclosed if all five will be placed inside the surrogate at once. The Savages' second and third kids were born premature, but are now healthy.

What a shame that after the birth of their second child, the Savages spent 10 years emotionally draining themselves trying to have a third child. This certainly has to negatively affect the two existing children, because emotional turmoil and feelings of hopelessness, frustration and angst will take its toll on the ability to create a stable, secure home life for all already in the household.

What a shame that the Savages couldn't direct their energy to the kids they already had. You're naïve to think that their two older kids have not been hit by the impact of their parents' 10-year, frustrating quest for more children. At a minimum, those boys had to have often wondered, "Aren't we enough for Mom and Dad?"

If the Savages couldn't be happy with only two or three kids, then they should have adopted at some point. There are thousands of hungry, unloved children who need homes!

Source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/32950836/ns/today-today_health/