Man Rejects Ex-Wife’s Plan to Put Frozen Embryos Up for Adoption

A woman’s decision to donate seven frozen embryos she won in a custody fight, rather than use them to become pregnant, does not end the battle, her ex-husband said Friday.

“I am totally against it,” Junior Lewis Davis, who produced the sperm for the embryos, said of his ex-wife’s decision to donate them to another childless couple.

“There is just no way I am going to donate them,” Davis said.

“I feel that’s my right. If there was a child from them, then I would be a parent to it. And I don’t want a child out there to be mine if I can’t be a parent to it.”

Davis, 31, and his ex-wife, Mary Sue Davis Stowe, 29, have been locked in a legal battle over the embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization in 1988 while they were still married.

In the only contested issue in their divorce, Blount County Circuit Judge W. Dale Young ruled in September that temporary custody of the embryos should go to Stowe, who at the time said she wanted to try to bring a child to term.

The judge, taking the unprecedented step of ruling that “life begins at conception,” accorded the embryos the same rights as children. He said it would be in the embryos’ best interests to be with Stowe.