Embryo Adoption May be an Option After Cancer Treatment

Roughly 12% of women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime. While more and more treatment options are becoming available, some of the most common treatments today for breast cancer can result in fertility problems. The news that you may not be able to conceive a child could be an especially devastating moment for any woman who hoped to be a mother one day. A cancer diagnosis doesn’t mean you are without options, though. Dr. Jennifer Litton, a writer for EverydayHealth.com, wrote an article about post-cancer infertility and cited different options that women have when searching for fertility solutions after they’ve been treated for cancer.

Dr. Litton writes about five options, including egg and embryo freezing, ovarian tissue freezing, ovarian suppression, surrogacy, and adoption. One option she left off of the list is embryo adoption. Many of the options cited require a woman to act before her cancer treatment begins (such as freezing eggs), and some women may not have time to wait to have a procedure done due to the demands of their treatment protocol. The cost of some of these fertility options can be prohibitively expensive, too. Embryo adoption gives women the chance to give life to a child when their cancer treatment would otherwise prevent it.

Embryo adoption doesn’t require a woman to do any long term planning before her cancer treatment. Instead, once she is healthy and medically cleared to become pregnant, she can begin the adoption process of one of the over 600,000 frozen embryos currently in storage in the United States. While there are fees involved in the adoption process, they are considerably less than In Vitro Fertilization, making embryo adoption an affordable alternative to IVF. This could be the chance at motherhood that many women thought cancer had taken from them.

If you’d like to learn more about embryo adoption, visit EmbryoAdoption.org.

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