Hello, welcome to the Editor's Desk.

This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.

I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things Magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

Well, I'm delighted today to be able to welcome Erica Anderson, columnist for World

Magazine Opinions, to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

And we're going to talk about your piece from the April 2025 issue, the piece titled, Who Owns the Embryos?

Mm-hmm.

An arresting question, indeed.

You open with a story about Emily Ballou, I suppose, is that pronounced properly?

Yes, yes.

And her husband and their sort of journey towards parenthood.

Would you walk us through that story?

Sure, yeah.

So Emily, she didn't necessarily need to go a non-traditional route to have children, but she was adopted as a baby.

And so adoption had always been on her radar.

And as she and her husband were thinking through how might we go through this adoption process, even after already having her own children. He brought up the

idea of embryo adoption, which she had not really heard about, didn't know a lot about. But the more

they looked into it, the more they thought this could be a really good option for us. It's almost

easier and actually could be cheaper than traditional adoption.

And you're also, at the end of the day, more likely to have sort of a, for sure we're going to get to keep this child situation.

And so they decided to go for embryo adoption.

Now let's take a break here.

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