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A growing number of companies are now offering to turn frozen embryos into keepsake jewellery. Marketed as a “gentler” way to honour life created during the IVF process, these businesses craft pendants, rings, and charms containing the remains of embryos that haven’t been implanted. One company, Blossom Keepsake describes its service as a “modern heirloom” for families who feel that donation “does not feel right.”
If we look at what the IVF industry promotes, it would be easy to think that the embryos created represent hope, longing, and the possibility of new life. When the so-called treatment ends, parents then face a decision: continue paying to freeze their children, donate them to another couple, or consent to destruction. Very quickly these babies turn from exciting new life into commodities. Parents who think donation “doesn’t feel right” can now wear a charm containing the embryo they destined for destruction.
Evidently this practice raises profound ethical and moral questions. Each embryo is a unique human being at the earliest stage of life, not merely a cluster of cells or a symbolic relic of parenthood. Embedding a dead baby into a piece of jewellery is deeply unsettling, ultimately reflecting a culture that has grown comfortable with the idea that human life can be created and destroyed with such flippancy.
IVF has long been accompanied by important moral considerations. Clinics often create multiple embryos to improve success rates, leaving many frozen indefinitely. Some are used for medical research, others quietly destroyed when storage fees expire. Now, a further step has been taken: transforming embryos into ornaments. The language of gentleness and remembrance cannot conceal the reality that, for an embryo to become a keepsake, it must first die.
There are compassionate alternatives. Embryo adoption, though not widely discussed in the UK, allows these tiny lives the chance to grow, to be born, and to be loved. Even when that option feels odd, we should still recognise the dignity inherent in every human being and the basic fact that that trumps the discomfort of parents who selfishly don’t want their children raised by other wanting families.
SPUC’s Communications Manager Peter Kearney says, “The wilful destruction of human life for the sake of personal decoration is the hallmark of a society that turns a blind eye to the plight of young human life, whether through abortion or IVF.”
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