Last summer, a baby named Thaddeus was born. He had been frozen for thirty years.

The couple who adopted him understood there were no guarantees. The transfer might not work. They chose him anyway. “They had a heart for the embryos,” says Beth Button, a vice president at Nightlight Christian Adoptions and director of the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. “They are now happy parents.”

Somewhere in the United States right now, there are an estimated 1.5 million embryos in frozen storage. The fertility clinics holding them are not required to report how many they create or how many they keep. The industry, as Button notes, is “not very well regulated when it comes to how many embryos may be created and how many are stored.” What becomes of those embryos is, for the most part, a question no one is required to answer.

Snowflakes was founded to offer a different answer.

The program began in 1997, under the umbrella of Nightlight Christian Adoptions. Clinics had been freezing surplus IVF embryos for more than a decade by then, and with the practice came a growing backlog — embryos left over after treatment, facing three dominant options: indefinite storage, research, or discard. A couple struggling with infertility, friends of Nightlight’s Ron Stoddart, heard about these embryos sitting unused in clinics and brought him a question: could they be adopted? Stoddart, an attorney, examined the legal landscape and moved forward. The first Snowflakes baby was born in 1998.

Snowflakes differs from most embryo donation programs in one important way: it treats the process as adoption rather than donation. That means applying the practices and vocabulary of traditional adoption to something the law classifies as property transfer.

“Yes, legally it’s not an adoption,” Button acknowledges. “However, the end result is a child being raised by parents to whom he or she is not genetically related, which is the definition of adoption.”

The language is intentional. Snowflakes does not use the words “donor” or “donor embryo.” The application process includes medical histories, family profiles, home studies, and a matching pool in which placing families retain significant influence over who receives their embryos. Support groups exist for placing parents. “That started once we realized just how difficult this can be emotionally for many of them,” Button says.

Not every family with frozen embryos comes to Snowflakes. The ones who do, Button has found, have usually arrived at a prior determination. “The people that wrestle with it are the ones that recognize that these embryos are children waiting to be born.” Even placing families who do not identify as religious often cite Snowflakes’ Christian identity as the reason they sought out the program. “We don’t use the term ‘embryo donation’ at Snowflakes because children aren’t donated. They’re adopted,” Button says.

Snowflakes begins with a different question: what should be done for the lives that already exist. Button speaks of the families she has watched over two decades, the ones “in this for the right reason, who are considering the needs of the children first.” She speaks of adopting families willing to request the longest-waiting embryos, the hardest-to-place ones. She speaks of Baby Thaddeus, frozen thirty years before someone said yes.

Button has been with Nightlight for twenty-two years, the last decade within Snowflakes. She has watched the families coming through face increasing challenges: more mental health struggles, more dysfunction, more complexity. Her staff encounters new difficulties nearly every day that, as she puts it, they simply were not seeing twenty years ago.

The mission, Button says, has not changed. “Every child deserves a loving home. We are child-centric rather than focused on the desires of adults. From our point of view, parenting isn’t a right. It’s a privilege.”

Somewhere in a clinic freezer, there is an embryo that has been waiting longer than Thaddeus waited. For nearly thirty years, Snowflakes has existed to help families say yes.

The Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program is operated by Nightlight Christian Adoptions. Since 1997, 1,500+ children have been born through the program.