Are Frozen Embryos Alive, Dead or Somewhere in Between?
The United States leads the way in freezing embryos for later use, while other countries, such as Germany, ban the practice outright
Here’s a tough question for you: Are frozen human embryos alive?
I mean, they’re frozen solid, not moving, not generating any energy.
They were once alive... but now they’re no longer alive.
But are they DEAD?
And if they’re dead, does that mean thawing them out and reanimating them is bringing the dead back to life?
The Nature of Life and Its Definitions
And what does all this mean for the nature of life itself?
And are there any implications for what it means to be a human being?
If we’re not a continuous biological process, but one that can be put on pause – put into a non-living state for decades, if not centuries – then what does that mean for life after death?
I always took the common sense view that a living thing is radically different from a non-living thing.
Life is notoriously difficult to define, but biologists usually say things like life is a self-sustaining, complex, organized chemical system that grows and develops, responds to external stimuli, can reproduce and adapts to its environment. (Which is why crystals and viruses are not alive.)
When something can no longer do these things, we usually say it’s dead.
But what about a frozen embryo?
The State of Suspended Animation
Well, they’re NOT alive according to most criteria.
They do not exhibit the active biological processes that define life in most scientific definitions.
Their metabolic activity is halted, and they do not grow or respond to stimuli while frozen.
But they’re not exactly dead, either – not if you define death as a permanent state in which life processes are irreversibly halted.
Doctors will tell you that frozen embryos exist in a state of suspended animation, neither dead nor alive, similar to hibernation in animals or dormancy in seeds.
They are not alive since they lack active biological functions.
But they’re not dead because they retain the potential to restore normal biological function after thawing and implantation.
I’m asking this because I recently met a former frozen embryo.
A Personal Encounter and Global Practice
He was a cute red-haired kid, about twelve, whose doctor parents created him in a test tube 20 years ago, kept him in a freezer for 10 years, and then re-animated him once they had time in their busy schedules to raise him properly.
The kid was implanted in his 50-year-old mother’s womb, and then brought into the world like any normal kid. She looks like his grandmother but is actually his mother.
This is not all that unusual.
Governments deliberately hide data on this practice because of a substantial amount of societal resistance to it – although the Frankenstein doctors who pioneered this technology are a powerful lobby.
However, it’s estimated that hundreds of thousands—likely well over a million— children have been born worldwide after being frozen embryos, at least temporarily.
In fact, experts say that the majority of children now born from IVF come from frozen embryos.
The Technical Process of Embryo Freezing
The way it works is like this.
Eggs are fertilized with sperm in a laboratory to create embryos, which are then cultured for several days until they reach a suitable developmental stage (often the blastocyst stage).
Embryos are then treated with cryoprotectant solutions—special fluids that replace water in the cells—to prevent ice crystal formation, which could damage the cells during freezing.
The embryos are then rapidly cooled in liquid nitrogen, instantly turning them into a glass-like state without ice crystals – a process known as vitrification.
They are then placed in tanks of liquid nitrogen at extremely low temperatures (around -196°C or -321°F), which halts all biological activity and preserves them indefinitely.
When the time comes to reanimate them, embryos are removed from storage and quickly warmed to room temperature, then to body temperature (37°C).
They are gradually soaked in special solutions to remove cryoprotectants and restore water to the cells, reversing the freezing process.
The Thawing and Implantation Process
Thawed embryos are checked for survival and “quality.” If viable, they are placed in culture media to recover and resume normal metabolism.
Those found sufficiently stable are then transferred into the uterus to attempt pregnancy.
Not surprisingly, many nations ban embryo freezing outright.
The practice is illegal in many European nations, including Italy and Germany, those nations with experience in unethical medical experimentation on human beings. (Nazi Germany had long experience experimenting on embryos in their eugenic quest for perfect Aryan babies.)
It is highly regulated in most other countries.
Some countries, particularly those influenced by religious or prolife perspectives, consider embryos to possess significant moral status or even personhood from the moment of fertilization.
Freezing, discarding, or using embryos for research is viewed as morally problematic.
The process of freezing and thawing can damage embryos, and surplus embryos are often discarded or left unused, raising ethical questions about the creation and disposal of human life, even if it a state of suspended animation.
Studies have shown that children born from “FET” (frozen embryo transfer) are at higher risk of childhood cancer than children born after fresh embryo transfer and spontaneous conception.
Finally, there are concerns about what happens to embryos when individuals or couples cannot be contacted or no longer wish to use them, leading to dilemmas over indefinite storage or destruction.
It’s estimated that there may now be more than 1 million frozen embryos locked away in liquid nitrogen freezers in a kind of legal and ethical limbo.
The American Exception and Statistics
The exception is the United States... where the overwhelming majority, 78%, of all embryo transfers using frozen embryos have been done.
The practice of manufacturing children in the lab for later use is largely an American pastime.
In the United States, between 2004 and 2019, there were 21,060 frozen donated embryo transfers, resulting in 8,457 live births from donated embryos alone.
This does not include the much larger number of births from non-donated (autologous) frozen embryos.
The longest-known successful frozen embryo transfer resulted in twins born in 2022 from embryos that had been frozen for 30 years.
Individual cases, such as Emma Wren Gibson, born from an embryo frozen for 24 years, highlight the viability of long-term embryo storage.
Not all parents are proud of their foray into “The Island of Dr. Moreau” reproductive experimentation.
The parents of the former frozen embryo I met, the cute kid, do not want him to know about his origins.
I wondered: why not?
The Ethical Implications of Frozen Embryos
If it’s all completely kosher from an ethical point of view, manufacturing children in a lab for storage and then later use, at your convenience, why not talk about it?
Why is it something to hide from the very people who resulted from it?
At the moment, I’m just interested in the metaphysical issues — what frozen embryos say about what life is… and what human beings are.
Strangely or not-so-strangely, given the lack of curiosity in our corporate media, most Americans know very little about frozen embryos.
Polls show that most Americans support in vitro fertilization, creating test tube babies, but few really understand that “extra” embryos are frozen and stored for later use.
Some polls show that 79% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans say IVF access is a good thing, indicating bipartisan support.
However, about one-quarter of Americans favor banning the destruction of embryos created through IVF, while 40% are neutral and about one-third are opposed.
Around 30% say the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fertilized egg is a person with the same rights as a pregnant woman” describes their views extremely or very well, but even among this group, a majority still support IVF access.
What do we do with the 1 million frozen embryos locked away in a state between life and death?
Catholic moral theologian Kent Lasnoski argues that these embryos exist in an unjust state of “suspended animation” - neither truly alive nor dead - and that Catholic teaching obligates believers to seek their good rather than leaving them indefinitely frozen or deliberately exposing them to death through thawing without implantation.
Drawing on Church documents like Donum vitae, he contends that maintaining embryos in frozen storage constitutes treating them as property and slaves, while thawing them without attempting implantation would be a deliberate exposure to death, both of which are morally impermissible.
It’s a conundrum that only our amoral medical profession could create, a profession that equates what is technologically possible with what is both permissible and morally good.
Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, and writes regularly at www.DisputedQuestions.com.