Thanks so much to those of you who joined us in Arlington, Virginia May 29-31 for the first Embryo Donation and Adoption Awareness Conference. Including speakers, moderators, staff and other participants, we had a total of 107 there. Those of you who were not able to come missed an excellent experience. Hopefully you will be able to attend a similar event in the future.

Like most small- to middle-sized meetings centered on a topic about which people feel strongly, the informal interactions during the two days were at least as valuable as any of the formal sessions. Many people who had previously known each other only by e-mail or phone were able to put faces with names. Clinicians, researchers, attorneys, adoption professionals, advocates, and several others mixed and shared ideas freely.

One clear highlight was the opportunity to listen, in person, to the experiences of several families who had participated in embryo adoption either as an adopting or a donor family. These friends were willing to share both the technical details of their experiences as well as the variety of positive and negative emotions they had gone through. As the conference went on, the participant families formed bonds with those who listened to their stories, and at least one couple told a small group that the experience was "therapy" for them. After attending the conference, those of us who have worked with embryo adoption mostly in the abstract certainly returned to the job with a better appreciation of the human side of the experience.

Dr. Susan Orr from the U.S. Department of Human Services opened the conference with a call for all the "pieces and parts" of the embryo adoption field to "move forward at more or less the same speed". She likened the participants at the conference to cells in the embryo itself -- bad things happen if one cell goes off and leaves all the others behind, or fails to communicate. Law, medicine, adoption practice, all of us must do our part to resolve the issues if embryo adoption is to become as widespread as most of us hope it will.

Dr. Jeff Keenan, director of National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, TN, covered a lot of territory in bringing the whole group "up to speed" on the medical facts and overall state of affairs of embryo adoption. This background was a "must" for those in the conference who do not work with the issue full time, and provided context for much of the other material in the breakout sessions.

Though it was impossible for any one person to attend more than five of the eleven breakouts, written presentation materials were made available. Dr. Curtis Harris and Mr. Ron Stoddart, in particular, did a fine job of focusing our thinking on what really ought to be done legislatively in order to prevent an occasional litigious disaster. These will be a lot more likely if embryo adoptions begin to happen at the rate of thousands per year rather than hundreds. I enjoyed the opportunity to co-present with Ms. Barb Collura of Resolve. We interacted with participants both about the resources available for families and about the outcome statistics and cost-effectiveness of embryo adoption.

Plenary speakers Mr. Sam Casey and Mr. Tom Atwood added some elements of controversy and challenge to the meeting. Mr. Casey, from the Christian Legal Society, made a strong case for the moral status of the embryo as a person.

Mr. Atwood's message was to watch out not to harm the successes of traditional adoption in our efforts to promote "embryo placement". He explained why he prefers this term rather than either "embryo donation" or "embryo adoption". Responders in the plenary sessions raised a series of thoughtful challenges in a spirit of respectful exchange.

Ms. Paige Cunningham from Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity closed the conference by working back through the issue of the moral status of the embryo and helping the participants leave with a clear sense of the bioethical options, if not with final answers. Most conferees are likely to better appreciate the breadth of "voices" in this field, and though the number of ethical questions grows with the number of participants, the widespread level of interest is also likely to provide more hope that the practice of embryo adoption will grow.

Every participant is likely to serve people more effectively because of his or her experiences at this conference.

-- Dr. Reg Finger