Brave new world: Embryo adoption plants a complex family tree

Embryo donation sometimes is an anonymous process, with donors and recipients engaging in a cloaked transaction through fertility labs that severs the likelihood of a future child's linking to a genetic past. But two couples insist on an open process so the genetically related children — even the children who still may be born from the two remaining frozen embryos — would stay connected. They felt their children had a right to know their genetic heritage, no matter if their full and half siblings are raised by different parents in different circumstances and most did not come from the same womb.

And the children's history is even more complicated, because their embryos were created using eggs from yet another donor. The egg donor, too, has her own two children, linking the children born from the embryos to even more half siblings. The branches of this high-tech family tree, germinated under a microscope, could potentially bear nine genetic full and half siblings living in two states, if not more, 2,000 miles apart. If this all sounds like untested waters in family dynamics, it is. stltoday.com