Human eggs are stored in canisters suspended in liquid nitrogen at the West Coast Fertility Centers in Fountain Valley, Calif.

Los Angeles times/ MARK BOSTER

Chris and Tanya Bailey of Mission Viejo, Calif., have a 3-year-old and triplet toddlers, all conceived through in vitro fertilization. After the birth of the triplets, they had 13 embryos left over in cryopreservation.

The idea of discarding them made the couple uneasy.

“I thought of them as potential life, but I don’t think of them as children,” says Chris Bailey. “They are definitely more than sperm and egg.”

After much discussion, the couple decided to donate the embryos to research.

“We felt we were so lucky that research had been done and [that it] gave us the opportunity to have children,” says Tanya Bailey. “So why not give our embryos to research as well to help somebody else out?”

The decision to donate to research, says Chris Bailey, “was a logical choice.”

Even after grappling with the decision, however, many people find that donating to research is easier said than done. People wishing to donate to research must complete detailed paperwork and may even be asked to select the type of medical research for which they want their donation used. Others find they cannot proceed with their donation if they used egg and sperm donors who would not consent to the donation. Still others simply can’t find a medical research organization to accept their donation.

“As stem cell research moves forward and viable treatments emerge, there will be a greater demand for the use of frozen embryos,” says Lois Uttley, director of the MergerWatch Project, a patients’ rights organization based in New York City. “That could raise the profile of this issue.”

The few states that fund stem cell research are more likely to be able to connect donating families to specific research programs that need embryos. People in other states do not have a clear pathway to donation, says R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Most IVF clinics are not hooked up to a research team and they may not be able to refer couples to a clinic who can do it for them,” she says.

And a sizable number of potential donors are turned away because of consent questions.

People who used donor eggs or donor sperm to create their embryos must obtain the consent of those donors before embryos can be released to researchers — something that may be impossible if the gametes (eggs or sperm) were donated long ago, especially if anonymous donors were used. About 15 percent of all IVF cycles involve donor eggs.

Protecting gamete donors’ rights is critical, says Nanette Elster, director of the Health Law Institute at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago.

“Someone may have donated with the idea that he or she is donating to help a woman build a family,” she says. “But if that is not what the family is going to use it for, maybe they wouldn’t get consent. The donors are individuals with concerns and a stake in the process.”

Although stem cells may one day be derived by other methods, those derived from embryos are, for now, the gold standard in research, says Dr. Marie Csete, chief scientific officer for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

“There is absolutely no need to take every frozen embryo and make a stem cell line,” she says. “But the science is changing a lot. We need diverse human stem cell lines to really understand the biology of a stem cell at a baseline.”