What can intended parents do with their leftover frozen embryos?

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When a family-building journey through IVF or surrogacy results in leftover frozen embryos, many intended parents are unsure what comes next. In this Ask a Surrogacy Expert video, we walk through the most common options — from continued storage and future family planning to compassionate donation pathways.

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Hey everyone, it's Jen with this week's Ask Question, which is what can intended parents do with leftover embryos? So yay, hopefully everything is successful, right, and people do have embryos left over, which happens really frequently. There are some options, and obviously I would always defer to a medical professional for better options in this, but the kind of well-known ones are you can keep them, you can keep them frozen for as long as you choose to. You can destroy them.

Usually people have had a discussion about what their disposition wishes are in advance. If you want to do that, you could donate them to another family. There are several services out there that help with that.

They have different ideological beliefs, so it's good to look into each of them. You can also donate them to science or to research. That can be, I've heard a lot of people have had a lot of trouble with that because a lot of those programs are closed or not taking currently any embryos, but there are other smaller ways you can do that.

You could actually ask your clinic if you could donate them to embryologists in training, things like that, just to help advance training versus advance science. So there are several options. It's something that you can always look into.

Again, I encourage every family out there, reach out to your medical provider. Definitely talk about these things in advance before you're creating those embryos, though, so that you're not in a panic or upset when you get to that point when hopefully you have too many embryos because things worked out well. Thanks so much.