Mom Donates Embryos to Women in Need
1 Mom Is Changing Lives by Donating Her Embryos to Couples Desperate to Be Parents
After getting wind of the fertility clinic malfunction that devastated hopeful couples in California and Ohio, Niki Schaefer, a 37-year-old mother of two from Chagrin Falls, OH, stepped up to the plate in hopes of helping women who dream of getting pregnant one day. Having successfully made it through fertility treatment herself, Niki knew just what to do: donate the four embryos she didn't use to other couples. She posted her plan to Facebook in a now-viral post and told POPSUGAR how she came to the decision after making some pretty profound ethical considerations.
"I always knew I had four embryos left. I paid $396 for them to be stored every year," she explained. "I wanted to donate them because I empathize so greatly with any woman or man who wants to conceive a child of their own and can't. But they are the biological siblings of my children, and the thought of those siblings being someone else's children is really difficult to wrap my mind around."
"And for the ones who can't try again with their own eggs and sperm, I hope that my embryos are part of a pool of donated ones that help them try again."
But as soon as Niki learned about the cryogenic tank failing at the University Hospitals Fertility Clinic, causing temperatures in the storage area to drastically increase and destroy families' eggs and embryos, her concerns immediately disappeared. "I was consumed by it. I know many of the doctors (including my own) who work there, and I know a lot of the patients as I have been very active in the infertility community since I had Noah almost nine years ago," she said. "My heart broke for all of them. That's what made my decision — that I was in a position to help them."
And the busy mom knows just how much of a struggle going through IVF can be without dealing with a busted cryogenic tank on top of it. She and her husband traveled that very same road themselves in order to have their two children, Noah, 8, and Lane, 6.
"I have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which means my ovaries are covered in cysts. This makes it difficult to conceive a child naturally. I found out I had PCOS when I was trying to get pregnant after I got married and it just wasn't working. It was absolutely devastating. All I wanted was to be pregnant and despite my best efforts, I couldn't make it happen . . . It was one of the darkest times in my life. Failed fertility treatments are also extremely difficult to bear. Not only are you shot up on hormones, you get your hopes up and they just come crashing down on you," she said.
Although Niki has yet to hammer out the exact details about how specialists are going to go about donating the embryos, she's hoping the move will help couples who want to have children as desperately as she did achieve their goal.
"I'd just add that from personal experience, what I found most helpful in getting through pregnancy-related disappointment was trying again," she said. "I hope these affected families find it within them to try to conceive again. And for the ones who can't try again with their own eggs and sperm, I hope that my embryos are part of a pool of donated ones that help them try again."
