Embryo 'adoption' answered these families’ prayers. The Christian right is using them to attack IVF

By casting excess embryos as ‘little frozen orphans’, these programs appeal to infertile US Christians – and push an alarming view of personhood

Originally published by The Guardian, June 5, 2025

Left image: Brianna and her mother Kathy Anderson share a moment of affection in the living room of Brianna’s home in California.Photograph: Francesca Forquet/The Guardian

Right image: Tyler Lisano, seven, looks out the window of his home in Colorado. Photograph: Benjamin Rasmussen/The Guardian

As soon as they arrived home, Tyler, seven, and Jayden, three, rushed to a small green tent perched on the living room table and pressed their faces against its mesh windows. Inside, several gray cocoons hung immobile as the boys’ eyes eagerly scanned them for the slightest sign of movement. “We’re waiting for butterflies to emerge,” explained their mother, Alana Lisano. “It’s our little biology experiment.”

Within seconds, the boys were off to play with their cars, having no patience for such waiting. But Tyler and Jayden, Alana told me, were like those butterflies not so long ago, suspended in a different kind of stasis for two decades.

Technically, they existed long before Alana met her husband, Steven Lisano, in veterinary school. Before they got married, tried to get pregnant and learned that Alana’s eggs were of such poor quality that even in vitro fertilization likely wouldn’t help. And before they attended an event at their Fort Collins, Colorado, church in 2014, where a representative of Nightlight Christian Adoptions described to them how countless embryos were waiting for a chance to be born, like little frozen orphans, in fertility clinics and storage facilities all over the country. By then, the embryos that would become Tyler and Jayden had been in cryopreserved storage for nearly 18 years.

Alana and Steven had never truly considered the implications of freezing embryos when you believe that life starts at conception.

As veterinarians, they were familiar with the science. After all, embryo freezing was developed to breed livestock before being applied to early human IVF practices in the 1980s. They knew eggs were fertilized with sperm in a petri dish, left to develop into embryos over several days, and frozen in liquid nitrogen to potentially be transferred to a uterus at a later date. What they didn’t know was that Christian programs in the US allowed them to “adopt” frozen embryos, and possibly, if they were lucky, have them grow into babies that Alana would give birth to.

It all sounded like something out of a science fiction novel. But the more they thought and prayed about it, the more it started to make sense.

Read the rest of the article at The Guardian