Our Blog
Three Boys and an Embryo Baby
I never expected to adopt. The concept wasn’t completely foreign—my wife, Julie, and I had discussed the possibility of adopting or fostering before we were married. But three years into building our family, we welcomed our first biological son, then a second, then a...
Is Egg Freezing the Only Solution?
Egg freezing may be used to preserve future fertility for women. Mature oocytes (eggs) are harvested from a woman’s ovaries, flash-frozen (vitrified), stored, and are later thawed to create embryos using in-vitro fertilization. Recently, we came across a very...
Immunization and Pregnancy
August is National Immunization Month. When you are pregnant, you share everything with your baby. This means if you get a vaccine during your pregnancy, you are sharing it with your unborn child. Vaccines help protect you and your baby against serious, preventable...
Embryo Adoption Frees a Flurry of Snowflakes – Part 2
This is part 2 of last week’s blog. This story is featured in the current issue of Pathway2Family magazine, Summer/Fall 2018. Read the whole issue online! In April, those nine lives were shipped from California to our clinic in Pennsylvania. We scheduled our first...
Embryo Adoption Frees a Flurry of Snowflakes – Part 1
This story is featured in the current issue of Pathway2Family magazine, Summer/Fall 2018. Read the whole issue online! I first heard about embryo adoption after my mother heard about it on a radio broadcast. It was 1997-1998 and the first embryo adoption program in...
Nine Tips on Sharing Your Child’s Adoption Story
You have experienced the joys of pregnancy and child birth with your adopted child. Now comes your next hurdle: Telling your child their origin story. How do you go about bringing that conversation up? Do you start now or start when he or she is old enough to...
40 Years Ago: World’s First “Test Tube Baby”
In July 1978, Louise Brown was hailed as the world's first "test-tube baby,” born through the fertility treatment in-vitro fertilization (IVF). At the time, IVF was an extremely experimental process. Louise’s mother, Lesley, was told there was one in a million chance...
Pathway2Family: 2018 Summer/Fall Issue
Check out the latest issue of Pathway2Family magazine at pathway2family.org! Here is what is featured in the Summer/Fall 2018 issue: Embryo Adoption Frees a Flurry of Snowflakes – A story by Snowflakes adoptive mother, Emily Shew, who adopted 9 frozen embryos...
Seven Little Lives = One Great Gift
Allison and Brent met at their church, and two years later were married! Then baby-fever hit. The original plan to wait a year to start a family changed quickly. Their attempts at pregnancy success in that first year culminated in the sad diagnosis of infertility....
Divorce and Remaining Embryos
Unfortunately, many marriages end in divorce. And with more and more couples using IVF to build their families, there is an increase of divorce settlements and disputes which include remaining embryos. What happens to these embryos in an event of a divorce? Are they...
National CMV Awareness Month
June is National CMV Awareness Month. CMV, or Cytomegalovirus, is a common virus which closely resembles a cold. 80-85% of women in the United States will test positive for CMV antibodies, meaning they contracted the virus earlier in their lives (likely as a child)....
What Causes Male Infertility?
As we have stated in previous blogs, infertility is most commonly thought of as a female problem. When in reality, men are equally likely to receive this diagnosis. The causes of female infertility are well identified (endometriosis, PCOS, low ovarian reserve, etc.),...
Speaking to Your Patients about Embryo Donation through Snowflakes
Explaining Embryo Adoption to Your Patients
Considering Anonymous Donors
Last week we talked through the very real fact that nearly 50% of all embryos available for adoption or donation are created with egg donors, sperm donors, or both. When thinking through your decision on whether or not to select embryos created this way, you may find...