Reply #8: What this translates into

[jmowreader]

That wall of people holding Snowflake® Babies isn't just comprised of fundamentalists, it's comprised of RICH fundamentalists.

I ran the numbers and we'll add a few things to this. You get your embryos in a little tank called a dry shipper. Since it's full of liquid nitrogen, it's like a big thermos. If you have to rent this thing it runs about $1000 with the deposit, cleaning fees and so on. Let's further say that even with insurance all your pre-pregnancy medical runs you $4500. Then add all the "adoption" fees at the high end and you're sitting at $20,000.

It would be callous of me to point out that the reason you have to consider this kind of pregnancy is that God has decided you've got enough kids now, and by going through all of this trouble you're actually thwarting the Will of the Lord (for which you get sent to hell most days), but I like callousness sometimes.

Okay, so all these Hell-bound people received a dry shipper when they finally received approval to participate in the Snowflake program. In it you will find no less than six embryos--says the FAQ, if the donors had less than six you'll receive embryos from two families, and if the donors had more than six you'll receive all they had. The company recommends implanting only three embryos at a time. There are, apparently, two critical control points in this process: thawing and implantation. They figure that if you get six embryos three are going to die during the thaw and two more will reject at implantation or die during pregnancy, so six embryos equals one screaming baby. But let's be funny and say that we pulled three embryos out, thawed them, implanted them and got two successful implantations. Now we've got one miscarried embryo, two good solid buns in the oven, and three embryos remaining in the dry shipper. You are, by your contract, supposed to discard the unused three embryos!

Read that again: this process destroys embryos.

If this is supposed to save the precious snowflake babies from being destroyed, it sounds like a half-ass way to do it to me.