"How Can You Part With the Embryo That Could Have Been Your Child?"
Deciding what to do with the leftovers can be surprisingly emotional and morally thorny; even those who are not religious or who support reproductive autonomy might still feel a sense of responsibility for their embryos.
So some patients are turning to a lesser-known alternative: a method called "compassionate transfer." The procedure is essentially an elaborate form of medical make-believe, in which clinicians place a spare embryo in a patient's body at a time in her menstrual cycle when she is unlikely to get pregnant. It mimics the steps of a traditional embryo transfer, but here, it's designed to fail; the embryo will naturally flush out.
