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" When 4-year-old Annabelle MacMillan&amp;#039;s grandmother invites her to peek inside the big box she has lugged out of her niece&amp;#039;s green truck, the little girl lifts the top for a nanosecond, then drops it and hides her eyes. Annie&amp;#039;s twin, Chloe, has a quick look, too, before taking cover behind her grandmother&amp;#039;s thigh. Soon, the other children \u2014 Chase and Jack Lindeman, 5, and Samantha and Mitchell Lyons, 6 \u2014 approach, clutching their moms&amp;#039; fingers, and cautiously peep in. Finally, Matthew Lyons, 10, marches across the lawn, sticks a hand in the box, and shrieks, &amp;quot;Ow!&amp;quot;  Grammy Sharon, her deep Maine roots showing, reaches inside, grabs several lobsters, and lets them loose on the flagstone walk. Within two minutes, all trepidation evaporates as the seven kids try to turn the crustaceans into pets. The three dads laugh, the three moms cluck to &amp;quot;keep your fingers away from the claws,&amp;quot; and the lobsters seem to look longingly at the big box.  Genetically, these seven kids with chocolate-brown or hazel eyes and light- to-dark-brown hair are as close as children can be \u2014 full-blooded siblings. Legally, they are not related at all. The emotional connections lie somewhere in between.  This pan-family picnic, held last August in Thomaston, ME, really started six years before, in 2002, with a form letter from Glenda and Scott Lyons&amp;#039;s fertility clinic. The Eau Claire, WI, couple had conceived their first child, Matthew, the old-fashioned way. But when a sibling didn&amp;#039;t follow within two years, they consulted doctors, who gave the couple painful news: Because of a perfect storm of reproductive problems between them, Matthew was &amp;quot;a miracle.&amp;quot; The only chance they had at ever conceiving again was in vitro fertilization (IVF).  They started immediately. In her very first IVF cycle, Glenda, then 32, produced nearly two dozen eggs. After doctors introduced Scott&amp;#039;s sperm, 18 embryos formed. Three days later, two of the embryos were successfully transferred into Glenda&amp;#039;s womb (two others were lost during the process).  The form letter arrived in January, three months before Glenda gave birth to Mitchell and Samantha on April 14: The fertility clinic wanted to know what the Lyonses wanted to do with their 14 remaining embryos. They offered three options: donate the embryos to research, donate them to an anonymous pool to be matched with infertile couples, or pay a few hundred dollars to leave them frozen.  Glenda, an accountant with corkscrew curls that evoke a grown-up Little Orphan Annie, read Scott the clinic&amp;#039;s letter while they were driving to look at a Trans Am the couple was thinking of buying. (A heavy-equipment operator, Scott, 41, restores and races vintage cars.)  Keeping their embryos frozen indefinitely did not seem a viable option to Glenda. And they were not the kind of people who&amp;#039;d throw money away on things they weren&amp;#039;t going to use. She didn&amp;#039;t have a moral objection to donating to science. However, she and Scott had not made the embryos for research.  &amp;quot;We made them to be kids,&amp;quot; Scott reminded Glenda.  While the couple agreed they could not personally raise a village, they were hesitant about donating their would-be children to complete strangers.  &amp;quot;I just can&amp;#039;t do the anonymous option,&amp;quot; Glenda told Scott. &amp;quot;Everywhere we&amp;#039;d look it&amp;#039;d be like, &amp;#039;Oh, that could be one of ours. Maybe that&amp;#039;s one.&amp;#039; I can&amp;#039;t live with not knowing.&amp;quot; Neither could big-shouldered, gentle-eyed Scott. He told Glenda, &amp;quot;Three children is plenty [for us]. They&amp;#039;re going to have to be somebody else&amp;#039;s kids. You just go find somebody.&amp;quot;  While many couples in their position would find reaching such a decision a torture, that was not the case for her and Scott, says Glenda. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d been through the pain of infertility. So we know how hard it is to get an egg and sperm, and then to get them both in the same place doing what they&amp;#039;re supposed to do.&amp;quot; And looking around the waiting room at her fertility clinic, Glenda could see &amp;quot;so many empty arms out there.&amp;quot;  Next: Glenda finds her match By the summer of 2002, Susan Lindeman, a then-41-year-old marketing executive in Richmond, VA, had achingly empty arms. In her seven-year quest to become pregnant, she&amp;#039;d spent 13 months on Clomid, endured seven cycles of injectable hormone-boosting drugs, undergone one diagnostic laparoscopy, and tried three cycles of IVF. Her results: one miscarriage, one tubal pregnancy, and one so-called chemical pregnancy, meaning she had lost it within a few days of missing her period, too early for anything to show up on ultrasound.  Susan \u2014 a pageboy blond whose optimism brings to mind South Pacific&amp;#039;s heroine Nellie Forbush (you really wonder if she&amp;#039;s going to break into song sometimes) \u2014 felt lucky in a way. Her health insurance had covered 85 percent of the cost of her treatments; only about 10 percent of infertility patients are that fortunate. So Susan and her husband, Bruce, an IT consultant, had spent only $16,500 in their unsuccessful attempts to start a family. But the next step \u2014 a donor egg fertilized by Bruce&amp;#039;s sperm \u2014 would have cost them $25,000 out-of-pocket, and her reproductive endocrinologist put Susan&amp;#039;s odds at carrying the baby to term at 60 percent. &amp;quot;I started thinking, If I were in Vegas and I had $25,000 and I had to put it on red or black, what would I do?&amp;quot; Susan says. Even though the Lindemans knew that adoption could easily take another several years, they began to explore that option. It would also cost a lot \u2014 between $5,000 and $40,000, depending on the type of adoption. &amp;quot;But most people who commit to that process do eventually succeed,&amp;quot; Susan says.  &amp;quot;And all we wanted was to be parents,&amp;quot; says Bruce, 48.  Just as they were emotionally preparing themselves for the adoption journey, Susan saw a curious post on an in vitro fertilization message board. A Wisconsin woman named Glenda and her husband had embryos they wanted to give away. The only criterion for the recipients: They needed to live far away from Wisconsin, so the kids could all have their own lives. It would also make it much less likely, Susan thought, that any of these full biological siblings would someday meet and marry. Susan contacted Glenda, who wrote back in a subsequent e-mail: &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t want to be part of your lives or the lives of any children that you have. So you won&amp;#039;t get any interference that way. Our object is to donate them to another couple who will give them life. They are too precious just to throw away or donate to science. Any embryos you don&amp;#039;t thaw, we would prefer to be placed for another donation. And we trust your judgment in this, since once we give them to you, they are yours to do with what you decide is best. I understand your struggle and the pain of infertility, so I know in my heart you will make the right choices.&amp;quot;  That night, Susan told Bruce about the offer and asked, &amp;quot;Is there anything weird in it for you?&amp;quot;  Bruce, a bearish man whose cool manner and loping gait hint at the competitive athlete he once was, has a biological brother and an adopted sister. Bruce thought about his siblings, both of whom he loves, and decided that making a family by embryo donation was sort of midway between. &amp;quot;Sounds nice,&amp;quot; he said.  Susan was glad. &amp;quot;Because it felt pretty good to me.&amp;quot;  As Glenda had said, she and Scott didn&amp;#039;t want to be &amp;quot;part of the lives&amp;quot; of the family they gave the embryos to. But she did want to feel like they were &amp;quot;our kind of people.&amp;quot; She did not have that sense about most of the 20 or so women who&amp;#039;d responded to her post. &amp;quot;I felt like those who didn&amp;#039;t tell me much maybe had something to hide,&amp;quot; she says.  But she was charmed by Susan&amp;#039;s chatty e-mail. And the posse of photos she attached \u2014 of their house, their pets, their favorite vacation spots, their favorite friends, even their favorite restaurant \u2014 put Glenda at ease. She could see that the children raised in this household would be surrounded with fun and love. She showed the pictures to Scott. &amp;quot;They drive a Ford,&amp;quot; he said with a groan. He flipped through a few more. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s a nice Ford and a nice house, and they do have dogs. If it feels good to you, I guess it&amp;#039;s OK.&amp;quot; OK, but not that easy. As the families learned, you can&amp;#039;t just &amp;quot;give&amp;quot; embryos away. You can&amp;#039;t even put them up for adoption. In many states, embryos are treated as personal property, and ownership of them has to be legally transferred \u2014 but the law around that varies by state. For instance, an attorney told the Lyonses and Lindemans that in Minnesota, where the Lyonses&amp;#039; clinic was located, the birth mother \u2014 not the genetic mother \u2014 is the legal mother of children. But if she divorced her husband, there was a possibility that the birth mother could sue the genetic father \u2014 in this case, Scott Lyons \u2014 for child support. Hearing this, Glenda&amp;#039;s first thought was: So ain&amp;#039;t nothing happening in Minnesota. Next: Where there&amp;#039;s a will, there&amp;#039;s a way Assisted-reproductive technology (ART) has developed so quickly that the law is playing catch-up with medical reality. The first IVF baby was born in 1978; the first baby produced from a frozen embryo (the couple&amp;#039;s own, not a donation) was born in 1984. Yet &amp;quot;most states don&amp;#039;t have a single law with the word &amp;#039;embryo&amp;#039; in it,&amp;quot; notes Lori Andrews, director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  Fortunately for the Lyonses and the Lindemans, a Virginia lawyer counseled that in that state, the only legal mother of a child is the person who gives birth to him, and the only legal father of that child is the husband of that mother. So the Lindemans drafted a one-and-a-half-page document with their lawyer in Richmond, and in early November 2002 the Lyonses&amp;#039; 14 frozen embryos, packed in liquid nitrogen and encased in metal canisters, arrived in two FedEx packages at Susan Lindeman&amp;#039;s clinic. Her doctor thawed six. Three did not make it. Three did. Susan&amp;#039;s doctor transferred all three viable embryos into Susan&amp;#039;s womb. Seven days later, Susan started using her cache of home pregnancy tests. One after another, they turned positive. Two of the embryos had implanted.  While they were working out all of the legal issues, Glenda and Susan e-mailed each other several times a week \u2014 and they never stopped.  &amp;quot;I held her hand,&amp;quot; Glenda says of their correspondence, &amp;quot;and knew everything that was going on with her all the time.&amp;quot;  By the time Susan was showing, Glenda felt she had a new sister. Scott, on the other hand, was not feeling the love. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re going to stay out of their lives,&amp;quot; he would say whenever Glenda brought up the subject. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not sticking our noses in it. Let them raise their kids.&amp;quot;  Scott was utterly immersed in raising his own. Matt was turning 5. Scott taught him to ride a bike, identify the parts of a car engine, and skip stones in his favorite creek. With the twins he played games, cuddled, and read books to them.  If he&amp;#039;d been having any second thoughts about giving away his and Glenda&amp;#039;s embryos to another couple, now that those embryos were growing into actual children, he would not have been alone. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine July 2001 found that 71 percent of couples change their mind about their embryo disposition \u2014 usually before they have gone down a path of no return. On July 1, 2003, Susan gave birth to a son and a daughter, Jack and Chase. Bruce e-mailed Glenda right away, attaching photos.  After a momentary hesitation, Glenda opened them. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re afraid you&amp;#039;re going to get attached,&amp;quot; she says, about seeing the pictures. But she&amp;#039;d been through so much with Susan \u2014 Susan&amp;#039;s morning sickness; Susan&amp;#039;s elation at the first kicks; Susan feeling, as she put it, &amp;quot;like a pinhead whale&amp;quot; at seven months; Susan&amp;#039;s joy (and anxiety) when her cesarean section was finally scheduled \u2014 that the babies felt like Susan&amp;#039;s babies to Glenda, not hers.  Seeing them in Susan&amp;#039;s arms in the photos, Glenda thought the Lindeman babies looked like their parents, too. It wasn&amp;#039;t that Chase and Jack didn&amp;#039;t resemble the Lyons children \u2014 they did. Rather, it was the way Susan and Bruce held the infants&amp;#039; gazes, touching noses to their own, cradling them in every single shot.... Well, thought Glenda, you could just tell that these were the babies&amp;#039; parents. But how would Scott feel? Glenda felt she had to tell him the Lindeman twins had been born.  &amp;quot;Oh, yeah?&amp;quot; he said. Huge pause. Glenda wondered what he was thinking. Maybe how overcome he&amp;#039;d been 15 months earlier when his own twins were born? Suddenly Scott spoke. &amp;quot;How do they look?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re good,&amp;quot; Glenda said. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;ve got 10 toes and 10 fingers. You want to see?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; Scott said.  Glenda explained, as best as she could, as honestly as she could, that while Chase and Jack resembled their own kids, they really looked part and parcel of the Lindeman family. Scott decided to take a quick look at the photos Susan had sent. He lingered. An easy smile grew across his face. &amp;quot;Oh, they&amp;#039;re really cute,&amp;quot; he said. Then he got dressed for work.  &amp;quot;Maybe we disconnected the minute FedEx took them away,&amp;quot; Glenda explains. Next: &amp;quot;Pay it forward&amp;quot; While Susan was still breast-feeding, she knew it was her time to &amp;quot;pay it forward.&amp;quot; The plan had been for her and Bruce to choose the next family for the embryos, but Susan now wanted to do it with Glenda. With everyone OK with the new arrangement, Susan posted a version of the embryos-available-for-open-adoption message in the fall of 2003.  She had to be a bit cryptic \u2014 &amp;quot;I have something you may want...&amp;quot; began her post \u2014 because the Website operators did not want the site to be used as a &amp;quot;trading post&amp;quot; for would-be parents and would-be donors on the ethical and legal frontiers of eggs, sperm, embryos, and surrogate transactions. Susan and Glenda \u2014 who were communicating by e-mail several times a week \u2014 did not know how to find a new family any other way. So they bent the rules, a little. Susan was turned off by those who seemed to brag about their wealth, and those who tried to impress with their faith. But she and Glenda liked several of the families who e-mailed, and decided not to do in-depth interviews or home visits. In fact, their main goal was to keep the selection process moving along very quickly because, Glenda says, &amp;quot;we knew it was killing&amp;quot; everyone who responded.  &amp;quot;In the struggle with infertility,&amp;quot; Susan explains, &amp;quot;you find yourself wishing your life away one month at a time. Every month your cycle starts again and you&amp;#039;re in tears and you spend the next 30 days hoping your cycle won&amp;#039;t start again, and then it does. Literally, you live your life in 30-day increments, wishing away the next 30 days.&amp;quot;  One of the women who wrote to them, from California, then-40-year-old graphic designer Dana MacMillan, felt she had fallen to a point of desperation below even that. Three years earlier, she had begun infertility treatment &amp;quot;where they just time your period,&amp;quot; Dana recalls. &amp;quot;Nothing. Then I went through inseminations. Nothing. I went through an IVF cycle, but I only got two follicles&amp;quot; \u2014 developing eggs \u2014 &amp;quot;and it was pathetic so I got canceled. Then we did a donor-egg cycle. Again, nothing. Not a blip. By that point we were out of options.&amp;quot;  The MacMillans&amp;#039; insurance had not covered the treatments, and they had already spent $35,000 trying to start a family.&amp;quot;The only reason we had been able to do it at all was because my grandmother died and left me a small inheritance,&amp;quot; Dana recalls. &amp;quot;My mother scraped together money, too.&amp;quot;  But the MacMillans were now out of savings and could not afford to adopt in any traditional way. By the time Susan and Glenda began their search, Dana and her husband, Cliff, a home-video marketer, were looking into becoming foster parents.  About five days after receiving Dana&amp;#039;s first e-mail, Susan and Glenda decided on the MacMillans \u2014 because they had &amp;quot;empty arms,&amp;quot; because they had exhausted every option they could to become parents, and because it was easy to imagine the kind of life the children would have with Dana and Cliff. The thing the MacMillans valued most was building a family, Susan and Glenda both say. And they had the support of their families to do that.  The two mothers didn&amp;#039;t care at all that the quest for a baby had left the MacMillans flat broke and that Dana would need to continue working. Glenda and Susan are working moms, too. &amp;quot;We weren&amp;#039;t looking for the children to have a life of privilege,&amp;quot; Susan says. &amp;quot;We were looking for the children to have a life of love.&amp;quot;  From her office in Virginia, Susan called Glenda in Eau Claire, then conferenced in Dana on the West Coast to give her the news. The eight remaining embryos were hers.  &amp;quot;It was the most amazing conversation I don&amp;#039;t remember,&amp;quot; Dana says. &amp;quot;I really don&amp;#039;t have a clue at all what they said, just this sudden knowledge that I had a chance to be a mother. This intense excitement that I would really, finally be pregnant. And gratitude so overwhelming it hurt.&amp;quot; The only snag was that they now had to legally transfer ownership of the embryos from the Lindemans in Virginia to the MacMillans in California. Whereas the Virginia contract was one-and-a-half-pages long, the California contract was half an inch thick. Because California had no specific law pertaining to embryo adoption, the MacMillans&amp;#039; lawyer told them that in order to transfer ownership of the embryos they would need to &amp;quot;make payment in consideration&amp;quot; to both the Lindemans and the Lyonses. &amp;quot;It felt like such an insult to what we were doing,&amp;quot; says Glenda. Many experts in the field believe that such payment does not constitute parentage, but the lawyer said there was no way around it. So Dana and Cliff wrote $1 checks to the Lyonses and the Lindemans, and both families cashed them.  Next: Dana becomes a mom When FedEx delivered the embryos to Dana&amp;#039;s clinic, she went to say hello. Her doctor put her on a cycle of hormones to prepare for implantation. A month later, he thawed four of the embryos and implanted all of them in Dana&amp;#039;s womb, because her history had been so bereft of success (the usual number is no more than three, for the health of the mother and growing fetuses). Two of the implanted embryos did fail. Still, Dana, too, was pregnant with twins.  The pregnancy, however, was anything but uneventful. One month into the first trimester, Dana felt &amp;quot;dripping&amp;quot; in her socks. She was bleeding profusely from an enormous clot she&amp;#039;d developed in her uterus. &amp;quot;I was crying and crying because I thought the worst had happened,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They rushed me in to do an ultrasound, and there were those two flickering heartbeats \u2014 the most beautiful thing I&amp;#039;d ever seen.&amp;quot; Dana was immediately put on bed rest, first at home and then in the hospital. Over the next five months, she developed HELLP syndrome (a rare pregnancy disorder affecting the liver and circulatory system) in tandem with preeclampsia. &amp;quot;My blood pressure was at stroke level, and in one week I put on 22 pounds of fluid,&amp;quot; Dana says. In addition to being sick and afraid, she was embarrassed. This should be my glory. This is a thing women everywhere do, she was thinking. And instead, this is what my body does to me even now. I&amp;#039;m terrified that it&amp;#039;s going to let me down, and my children aren&amp;#039;t going to make it. At 31 weeks, Dana collapsed on the way to the bathroom. Her doctor immediately delivered her twins, Annabelle and Chloe (&amp;quot;Coco&amp;quot;). The babies were small \u2014 three and four pounds \u2014 but otherwise fine. Dana, however, was in the maternal intensive care unit, too unstable to even see them. &amp;quot;My mom and Cliff would bring me the clothes that they wore, so I would have their scent.&amp;quot; Dana wound up hospitalized for another two weeks and was ill with elevated blood pressure for another six months. Still, she knew she had two important jobs: caring for her baby daughters, and finding a home for the four remaining embryos. She offered them to a beloved cousin.  &amp;quot;But,&amp;quot; says Dana, &amp;quot;my cousin decided it was too much pressure.&amp;quot; She didn&amp;#039;t want to be the one woman who failed to make babies out of the Lyonses&amp;#039; embryos. In turning them down, she asked Dana, &amp;quot;Does lightning really strike four times?&amp;quot; In the end, it did not. Together, Dana, Susan, and Glenda gave the last four embryos to a couple in Texas, but the transfer failed. The Lyonses&amp;#039; embryos were finished.  &amp;quot;We were all sad,&amp;quot; Glenda says. &amp;quot;Especially for the couple. But it also felt good to be done with it. The wild emotions of looking for a good family, feeling terrible to let so many people down.&amp;quot; Susan adds, &amp;quot;It also felt right to turn all of our attention to raising the kids we were so fortunate to have.&amp;quot;  Next: One big, happy family From the moment Susan gave birth, she felt an intense need to meet Glenda. &amp;quot;I had to thank her in person for giving me my family,&amp;quot; she says. So as soon as she and Bruce were up to braving airplane travel with twins \u2014 which Susan is slightly embarrassed to admit was not until their twins were 13 months \u2014 they packed up Jack and Chase and went to Wisconsin. Even Scott was eager for the visit. Seeing the dozens of photos Susan e-mailed Glenda \u2014 of Susan with her twins on their first birthday, of Bruce showing them their first snow, of both parents&amp;#039; thrill at their first steps \u2014 had made the Lindeman kids, well, seem like Lindemans, not Lyonses. For Scott, the family had come to feel like people who should be in their lives \u2014 like long-lost relatives.  Before Bruce had parked at the end of the Lyonses&amp;#039; country road, Susan leaped out of their rental car. She pulled Glenda into a fierce hug and sobbed, &amp;quot;Thank you. Thank you.&amp;quot; Then, Susan pulled her children out of their car seats and pressed them into their biological parents&amp;#039; arms.  &amp;quot;They really, really looked like our kids,&amp;quot; Glenda recalls, describing her first encounter with Jack and Chase. &amp;quot;They had very similar smiles. But they didn&amp;#039;t feel at all like our kids because we didn&amp;#039;t know them and they didn&amp;#039;t know us. They had other people&amp;#039;s mannerisms. They looked at us like, &amp;#039;Who are you?&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  But later, Glenda and Scott confided to each other that the Lindeman kids really did feel like family. And it was a pleasant, not painful, feeling. &amp;quot;Like nieces and nephews,&amp;quot; Glenda says. Perhaps anticipating this, the Lyonses had told their sons and daughter, before the visit, that the Lindeman children were their new cousins \u2014 in kidspeak, family that doesn&amp;#039;t live with you.  Susan and Bruce both thought that Glenda&amp;#039;s explanation made emotional and age-appropriate sense, and went with it, too. Throughout the weekend, Susan watched the affection flow fast and free \u2014 &amp;quot;Glenda&amp;#039;s mom just scooped Chase right up,&amp;quot; she recalls \u2014 yet she remained confident of her twins&amp;#039; attachment to her. She was equally confident of Glenda&amp;#039;s absence of maternal feelings toward them. So, Susan says, she was free to &amp;quot;discover connections&amp;quot; among the kids beyond honorary cousinhood. Her first: that her daughter, Chase, and Glenda&amp;#039;s daughter, Sami, both have Glenda&amp;#039;s mother&amp;#039;s smile. Her second: that Glenda and Scott&amp;#039;s parents consider all of the embryo children their grandchildren. Susan was thrilled.  &amp;quot;My dad died recently, and my mom is elderly,&amp;quot; Susan says. &amp;quot;I like that the kids have all of this love.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It really is like family,&amp;quot; her husband, Bruce, adds. Then he smiles slyly. &amp;quot;Just without the baggage.&amp;quot;  Dana wished to believe that introducing her twins to their genetic siblings would be so simple. &amp;quot;I wanted to meet the Lyonses.&amp;quot; She felt her daughters had a right to hug the nice lady who, as she had told them since they were capable of understanding, &amp;quot;was so generous she gave me some of her baby parts&amp;quot; because her own baby parts hadn&amp;#039;t worked. At the same time, she was terrified that fostering a connection would come with an emotional load she could not carry. &amp;quot;I had a lot of anxiety,&amp;quot; Dana says. &amp;quot;Fear that Glenda was going to be a better mother than me, fear that my children would be drawn to her.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t worried at all,&amp;quot; says Cliff. &amp;quot;It was obvious from the day the girls were born they were completely attached to us. The only thing I&amp;#039;ve ever worried about [during this process] was Dana&amp;#039;s health.&amp;quot;  In March 2007, when Annie and Coco were 3, the MacMillans invited the Lyonses to visit more &amp;quot;cousins&amp;quot; in California. They decided to meet at the Lyonses&amp;#039; hotel. Dana insisted on driving her family. &amp;quot;We were running very late, and I missed the turn into the driveway. [I thought] here is this amazing woman, and I can&amp;#039;t even get into the right lane in time to make a turn. [At that moment,] I was nervous that she wouldn&amp;#039;t think we were good enough to deserve her babies.&amp;quot; The Lyonses were waiting at the curb, holding presents. The MacMillans had brought giant Easter baskets for the three Lyons kids. So the meeting began with an exchange of thank-yous, and you&amp;#039;re-welcomes, and then-9-year-old Matt Lyons cooing at the two MacMillan babies, &amp;quot;My sisters! My sisters! My sisters!&amp;quot; Glenda had warned Dana that her kids had recently seen a video of a TV interview Glenda had given about embryo donation. In it, the newscaster referred to all of the children born from the Lyons embryos as &amp;quot;siblings.&amp;quot; Glenda had told Matt that just as she sometimes donates blood, she also &amp;quot;donated some cells that [the other parents] needed and didn&amp;#039;t have. That&amp;#039;s why [the other kids] look so much like you. Because you all come from the same cells.&amp;quot;  Matt had said, &amp;quot;So we&amp;#039;re brothers and sisters?&amp;quot;  And Glenda had answered, &amp;quot;Genetically yes. But they have their own family.&amp;quot; Dana found Matt&amp;#039;s petting and cooing &amp;quot;a little surreal&amp;quot; but also &amp;quot;so sweet and tender.&amp;quot; More important was the thing Dana could see \u2014 and intensely feel \u2014 between her daughters and Glenda: They were strangers. Glenda was gentle and sweet in greeting them, but the girls were at an age when familiar is always better, and they wanted their mom: Dana.  Next: IVF: Is it right for everyone? Emotions in families created by assisted-reproductive technology are often not so simple, says lawyer Lori Andrews. Many attempt to stave off trouble \u2014 for the parents and the kids \u2014 by keeping facts about a child&amp;#039;s conception secret. As many as 90 percent of children conceived through sperm donation are never told, Andrews says. But often the truth comes out in anger, during a divorce (when a dad doesn&amp;#039;t want to pay support for children who are &amp;quot;not his&amp;quot;) or during an argument (when a child is accused of acting like the &amp;quot;stranger&amp;quot; she is). Couples who are open about their use of a donor face other emotional challenges. For example, a child may feel an intense need to know about, or even meet, his donor or donors. But if it was an anonymous donation arranged by a fertility clinic, privacy laws can prevent that from happening.  The Lyonses, Lindemans, and MacMillans have routed both of those predicaments. If it had been up to nature, they might have lived out their lives without so much as crossing paths. That changed when reproductive science crashed into parental realism, and Glenda and Scott Lyons opted to find an infertile couple to take their remaining embryos.  As things turned out, the Lyonses cannot fathom that they will ever face the most common crisis for donor couples: changing their minds. They have met all of the children. Held them. Changed them. Kissed them. Left them.  &amp;quot;Donating embryos isn&amp;#039;t for everyone,&amp;quot; Susan Lindeman says. &amp;quot;Some people are just too confused, freaked out at the idea of their children running around somewhere else in the world.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s totally understandable,&amp;quot; Dana MacMillan says. &amp;quot;For me,&amp;quot; Glenda Lyons adds, &amp;quot;bonding happens at birth.&amp;quot; After the Lyonses&amp;#039; visit to California, someone proposed organizing what would be the first gathering of all three families. The Lindemans and the MacMillans would also be meeting for the first time. Through a family friend, Dana had access to a trio of beachfront cottages near her mother&amp;#039;s childhood home on the coast of Maine. And everyone could get time off in late August.  So in the waning days of summer 2008, everyone flew to New England. Although it was their first in-person meeting, Susan and Dana, especially, already felt close \u2014 through four years of shared e-mails, phone calls, photos, friendship with Glenda, and, of course, their shared motherhood of biological siblings.  In addition to those striking eyes and that hair, the seven children in this extended biotech family have similar features and gangly limbs, like their biological parents. Yet each has an utterly distinct personality \u2014 maybe because of what nurtured them in the womb, what nurtures them daily in their homes, or maybe just because nature, even when science intervenes, makes all creatures unique.  As the sun sets on a postcard-perfect afternoon, the adults laugh, trying to imagine how their children will draw family trees. It will certainly be a knotty mess \u2014 parents unrelated, offspring who could not be more connected. Parents who in case, God forbid, something horrible happens to them, have designated their own siblings (for the Lindemans and MacMillans, their children&amp;#039;s nonbiological aunts and uncles) as legal guardians. Parents who promise that if, God forbid, something horrible happens to the other parents, they would &amp;quot;look out for&amp;quot; any or all of the children.  Nearly a dozen grandparents lay claim to every single kid \u2014 literally, seven snapshots on every refrigerator. Yet, for the parents who have made wills, only their legal offspring are designated beneficiaries. Frankly, they are in an emotional frontier and none of them knows where the boundaries lie.  As the afternoon shadows lengthen, a few early maple leaves fall, and the children continue making pets of the lobsters intended for dinner, Bruce Lindeman is trying not to cry. His one terrible fear about his brave-new-world journey into parenthood emerges as the sun touches the sea.  &amp;quot;I waited so long to be a father,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m 48 now. I&amp;#039;m afraid I won&amp;#039;t be around long enough to enjoy it. And I really want to walk my daughter down the aisle.&amp;quot; Next: Facts about embryo donation Embryo Donation: By the Numbers Donating remaining embryos can be a supreme gift of love. But the practice is still a minuscule part of fertility treatments \u2014 and some discourage it, fearing logistical complications as well as ethical ones. Of 50,769 babies delivered as a result of assisted reproduction in 2006 (the latest data available), only 356 were from donated embryos. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s not as much acceptance of embryo donation as you might think,&amp;quot; says Elizabeth Ginsburg, M.D., president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART). &amp;quot;Most people want a genetic connection with the child if it&amp;#039;s at all possible, and most couples are not comfortable having embryos created for them going into another couple.&amp;quot; The embryo picture today:  On average, seven embryos are created in an IVF cycle, but only two to three are used for each pregnancy attempt. Embryos that remain and are still viable are usually frozen, ready for further treatment if the first cycle is unsuccessful, or if the first treatment works and the couple desires more children later. About 500,000 embryos are now in frozen storage in the United States, according to SART, most in anticipation of future treatment by the original couple. But about 80 percent of IVF treatments are done with fresh, because the success rate is higher, so the oversupply grows.   A couple can keep their embryos frozen indefinitely (research shows they remain viable for at least nine years; storage fees can run up to several hundred dollars a year), donate them to someone else, donate them to research, or have them thawed and discarded. The success rate using donor embryos is better than that of frozen embryos used by the people who created them. In a 2008 survey of over a thousand people with embryos in storage at nine fertility clinics, 48 percent indicated they were somewhat or very likely to donate their excess embryos to research. Less than half as many (22 percent) were somewhat or very likely to donate to another couple; about the same percentage said they would be somewhat or very likely to have their embryos thawed and destroyed. For every couple willing to donate embryos, there are an estimated two hoping to receive them, according to Reginald Finger, M.D., of the National Embryo Donation Center. About one-third of IVF clinics offer embryo donation, and about two-thirds of embryo donations take place within a single clinic. The other third involves outside agencies (some profit-making, some nonprofit) that screen, match, and counsel prospective donors and recipients.As with any other human tissue, infections such as HIV and hepatitis can be passed via embryo donation. The embryos can&amp;#039;t be checked directly, so donors have to be tested. (In some cases, the embryos of untested donors are used, but they must be clearly marked so the recipient knows the small risk she is taking.)In most instances, recipients pay for donor testing, transportation of the embryos, and sometimes for storage fees, as well as for their own medical treatment. According to a study presented at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine in 2008, the cost of a delivery using a donor embryo is about half of that when using a donor egg. Although embryo donation is often called embryo adoption, and many elements of the adoption process (such as a home study) may be involved, legally, the actual transfer of embryos is generally governed by property/contract laws. That means that once a contract is signed and embryos are turned over, donors can&amp;#039;t change their minds, and they have no further legal rights or responsibilities to the embryos or the offspring.Donation can be anonymous or not, with couples determining the level of ongoing contact or information exchanged. At some centers, prospective donors and recipients gain access to details (and sometimes pictures) to help pick who&amp;#039;ll give and receive frozen embryos.The Resolve Website (resolve.org) contains a wealth of information about embryo donation and is a good place to start if you&amp;#039;re considering the process.\u2014Susan Ince "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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