“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases: it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

(Keats, “A thing of beauty”)

Imagine the choices. You have successfully had two children using in vitro fertilization (mixing eggs and sperm in the laboratory), but there are 10 embryos left over. When faced with such an overabundance, what would you do? Do you attempt to have more children, discard the embryos, or donate them to embryonic stem cell research?

This choice is faced by thousands of parents every year, because, for every successful in vitro fertilization, more embryos are created than can be implanted into a womb.

If you choose research, scientists will harvest the inner mass of cells from your embryos and transfer them into a plastic laboratory culture dish. After six months or more, the original 30 cells of the inner cell mass will proliferate, yielding millions of embryonic stem cells.

Future experiments with your embryonic stem cells could lead to partial or complete cures for Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and type I diabetes. They may even be useful for repairing heart muscle damaged from a heart attack.

If you choose to implant the embryos into your womb (or into that of your wife or a stranger’s) they will most likely grow into a child that will be loved.

If you choose to discard the embryos, they will pass into nothingness— no research will be carried out and no additional children will be created.

I think about the donors of these gametes. Some of these couples may have wanted a child for years. Some may have lost pregnancies through repeated miscarriages. I know one woman who lost her only child to a sudden heart attack on the high school football field; a weak heart that had gone undetected. These parents are beyond ecstatic when the in vitro approach is successful. I expect that it cannot be an easy decision for them to discard “surplus” embryos. After all, can one separate the concept of a child from that of an embryo?

What would I do? Would I donate the embryos to stem cell research so people like my father-in-law could one day have new bone marrow cells that would mitigate his leukemia? Or would it be too difficult to give up the idea of more children.

I think of the physical characteristics of my own boy and girl: the dimples of my son that he shares with his father and grandfather; the blue eyes that I envied in my handsome brothers, now his. My daughter’s dark, thick lashes that have no precedent in recent family history. And then the complex behaviors- the calm, easygoing son who asks, puzzled, “mommy why do some people get mad so easily?” The daughter who does. The picture-perfect handwriting of one, the illegible scrawl of the other that is so closely related to my own. The team player and the rebel. I cannot help but wonder what our other children would have been like if we had had more.

And I would want more. After all, I was never was one to stop with one cookie. So sweet, so satisfying, seemingly simple. But I also know reaching for too many can bring indigestion. Before deciding to have more children, I would need to consider the possible stress it would bring. Would more children disrupt the delicate balance of family harmony we have occasionally achieved?

President-elect Obama has indicated that he will lift the current administration’s ban on the federal funding of research on embryonic stem cell lines created after August 9,2001. That means that parents who donate their embryos will enhance the ability of some of the best scientists in the nation to develop cures to some of the most dreadful diseases. And they may be successful in our lifetime.

I imagine that faced with the choices of donate, discard or raise more children, that I would choose donation. A simple act of generosity, perhaps, but one made with regret and sadness for the children that I would never embrace.

• from Shakepeare’s Sonnet 87