[Federalist] When faced with infertility, Ericka Andersen turned to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in hopes of finally having children of her own. A committed pro-life advocate, she believed IVF aligned with her values. But it wasn’t until she gave birth to her children that she learned how many extra embryos had been created in the process.
No one prepared Ericka for the weight that she would carry because of her decision. Years later, she lives with daily pain and grief over the nine lives she never expected to create but cannot ignore.
"Today, I have two healthy, amazing children [that] were conceived from this decision and I am everyday grateful for this," she wrote recently in a Substack post. "However, I have deep anguish at the lives that I haven’t carried, the siblings of my children that they will never meet. The babies I will never know, whose eyes I will not see, whose bodies I will not rock, whose smiles I will not recognize."
Too many families like Ericka’s begin their IVF journey without fully understanding the implications, risks, and decisions they will face. Behind the closed doors of fertility clinics, thousands of embryos are being created daily, but we have no idea exactly how many and what the fate is for each of them.
Families deserve to know what they are consenting to, and the public deserves insight into an industry that has significant ethical issues but is currently operating with little oversight.
IVF is a process in which a woman’s eggs are fertilized outside of the womb in hopes of increasing her chances of having a live birth. The IVF process consists of four main steps. The first is egg retrieval from the woman. Then comes the key step in the process, fertilization; it is at this point that the egg goes from a gamete to a human embryo with its own unique set of DNA. After the embryo is created, it is then transferred into the uterus, and, in most cases, embryo freezing follows to preserve the leftover embryos that did not get transferred. 
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