UGH.

In my last post, I told you all about my friend "C"., who is having IVF for the only reason of gender selection. I made my feelings well known.

SO...just to update, and because the whole thing is making me crazy...here are the stats:

C., had her retrieval on Tuesday and they got ten eggs; seven were fertilized.

They called her today to say that ALL seven were still growing and looked beautiful-they were all three's and four's (a grade of four on day three is the best). Kind of not surprised by this, since she doesn't have fertility issues after all!!!

They are sending all of the embryos out for PGD today and she should know by Sunday if she has any healthy girls in the mix. With seven, I'm sure she does.

So like I said, this whole thing is making me crazy and I'm struggling to handle it with grace. It's not my life, my body, my embryos...but I still don't have to like what she is doing. It is out of my control though.

One thing that bugs me is that all seven embryos are doing great. I know this sounds odd to complain about, but that means there potentially could be SIX healthy embryos that are completely discarded "just because". This really upsets me. It upsets me when I think of how hard I worked for my babies and how hard so many women are still working.

I'm not overly religious, I'm not that into organized religion (although I do believe in God and do pray almost daily for the safety of my kids and family--something no one really knows about me). I support gay rights completely, stem cell research, I'm fairly liberal...but this just seems wrong to me.

When she told me the news, I actually felt like crying. I was hoping she wouldn't have so many, that there would be less being discarded.

And I'm also wondering where the "fairness" is! Out of 21 eggs retrieved, I only had one healthy enough to make my beautiful baby. I went through hell that cycle. Everything that COULD go wrong, did. I'm so extremely lucky we have Hayden here with us. And she just gets to float through her cycle on a cloud with everything, everything going perfectly. Ugh...all those healthy embryos :/

So I'm just having trouble with the whole thing. I went into IVF after giving it a lot of thought. I knew that we wouldn't discard any of our embryos, even though I have only every wanted 2 or 3 kids. But as I see it, I had a responsibility to ALL of those embryos because WE chose to create them. We would have also considered embryo adoption if we had a ton left over. Because lets face it, I'm pretty sure I couldn't handle six kids, lol. I guess it's important, more so than I realized to me, that the integrity for life stays in the whole process.

 I fully realize that I sound "holier than thou"...but no thought went into this on her part. All she could think about was that she wanted, "needed" a girl. She didn't consider any moral dilemmas. At least if you're going to do this...truly think about it, understand what you're doing, even if you make a decision to discard. Don't just go into it with a flippant, blase attitude without doing the research. And perhaps this is what bugs me most of all by this situation.