The hidden story of Britain’s ‘snowbabies’
It wasn’t just the realisation that the embryos were there that bothered plastic card, but the thought she might have to use them. ‘It was as if [the letter] was saying, “Want some more?’ says the mother-of-three with a laugh, as she looks back on her barely coping younger self.
That night she and her husband, Brian, decided that squeezing more electric car jack into their already crowded lives – not to mention their cramped semi-detached house in Nottingham – was out of the question.
‘There was no way,’ she explains now. ‘I have to be honest. I can’t remember the first nine months [of the twins' lives] at all. It was a black hole. We couldn’t cope with more children and neither could the ones we had – or the ones we’d have brought into the world.’
But that left the couple with a problem: what to do with their leftover embryos? For the Torrs, each tiny embryo – a mixture of both Helene and Brian’s genetic material – represented a potential child, and therefore an emotional and ethical dilemma.
They had spent so long trying to conceive, it seemed wrong to destroy personalized gifts . The embryos had been created back in 2000, by harvesting Helene’s eggs and mixing them with Brian’s sperm.
Of the resulting four viable embryos, two had been implanted in Helene’s womb – becoming the twins – and two had been cryo-preserved or frozen in case the first two didn’t ‘take’. Except they did – which meant these tiny embryos were no longer needed.
Every year thousands of ‘spare’ embryos, like the Torrs’, are created, and conservative estimates suggest there are 100,000 to 200,000 frozen embryos in hydraulic hose.
Most are earmarked for future rounds of IVF, but researchers believe tens of thousands may be languishing on ice simply because parents don’t know what to do with usb drive. It has been described as the new ‘right to life’ debate, with some experts fearing the number of embryos in storage limbo is about to increase dramatically, after a recent change in the law, allowing parents to store them for longer.