The Hidden Story Of Britain’s ‘Snowbabies’

There are tens of thousands of 'spare' IVF embryos currently in storage in Britain, but parents face an agonising choice in deciding what to do with them.

The Sunday Telegraph UK, 2010

When Helene Torr received a letter from her IVF clinic in the spring of 2001 its arrival was almost comically timed. The past few months had passed in an exhausted blur of caring for her toddler and newborn twins, one of whom has a disability.

That morning her kitchen was strewn with pastel-coloured baby toys and piles of tiny clothes. So the clinic's reminder that two 'spare' embryos remained in storage came as a shock.

It wasn't just the realisation that the embryos were there that bothered her, 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 children 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.