Blossom Keepsakes is a custom jewelry company that creates “heirlooms” from “unused IVF [in vitro fertilization] embryos.”  Claiming “a deep respect for life and the incredible journey families take to create it,” they take excess embryos consigned to them from your in vitro fertilization clinic storage units and “encapsulate the essence of life in stunning, handcrafted jewelry designed to last for generations.”

They’re not the only embryo-to-jewelry business out there.  Australia’s Today, Tomorrow, and Always is there “[w]hen IVF journeys don’t unfold as planned, honor the love and possibility they represented with a handcrafted memorial keepsake.” Like abortionists, they want to “honor” their clump of cells and profit from it, too: they don’t admit so much to using embryos as to crystallizing “precious DNA, ashes, or a lock of hair.” New Zealand’s Spilt Milk Company assures customers “[t]here’s no right or wrong choice when it comes to deciding what to do with your embryos. Every path is valid, and every choice is deeply personal. If embryo keepsake jewelry [sic] feels like the right way to honor your fertility journey, know that you’re not alone….”  Keep your “embabies” close to you.

When these stories hit the press in November 2025, they elicited great surprise and controversy.  I wasn’t surprised because I had already seen examples of such behaviors in the modern growth of cremation’s cultural acceptance.  Making jewelry out of cremains (ashes) has already been a business for a while: “keep your loved one close to you” as a pendant.  The next step is saving your dearly departed’s  “tattoo art.” A patch of skin bearing the “art” is removed, treated like parchment, and set in a sealed frame – so that this creation can be “preserved.”

If bodies are not reified into mementos, the other extreme is their utter destruction: some states have already legalized alkaline hydrolysis, a process to turn a body into effluent –waste water—that can then be used as liquid fertilizer or poured down the drain so as not to leave a corpse carbon footprint behind.  Recomposting turns bodies into human mulch.

Embryo jewelry goes one further: the process of making jewelry usually causes the death of the embryo.  Embryos “leftover” from IVF procedures are typically kept cryogenically frozen in “embryo straws” – a sterile tube that looks like a drinking straw — in which the embryos are kept in liquid nitrogen storage.  Beyond Love Creations down under in Australia explains how they incorporate your embryo into jewelry: the customer (AKA “parent”) gets the straws from IVF clinic, puts them in
“bubble wrap and then a zip lock bag,” sends them to Australia, and then Beyond Love “will cremate your straws and either craft with them or return them to you as cremations [sic] (please note the ashes are very minimal once the straw has been cremated).”  (In case you’re interested, they’ll also memorialize your sperm, umbilical cord, breast milk, menstrual blood, and/or hair).  Be assured they care for their craft: they offer annual maintenance (cleaning and polishing) of your jewelry gratis.  Blossom Keepsake wants you to have a lasting “tribute” that reflects a “deep respect for life” (and their entrepreneurial spirit – fees for rings starting at around $125).

Where does one start?

Popes from Pius XII in 1951 Allocution to Midwives to today have warned about the commodification and reification (i.e., turning into a thing) of life.  In one sense, the Pope’s statement was abstract: he seemed to be talking about the change in mental attitude that ineluctably would follow from using artificial processes to “make” a baby.  In  1951, even the Pope probably did not imagine people turning their unborn babies into things.  But when a child is produced according to particular manufacture standards and designated model specs (clean genetic heritage, specified eye color, anticipated intelligence), the child actually becomes a product.  And “products,” as things, do not have to be received as is: return or discard always remain options for things.

But these businesses have moved abstract reification into the concrete: embryos are turned into actual things. People viscerally experience discomfort when facing a person made into a thing.  Most people’s’ original reaction to seeing a swath of Uncle Joe’s skin on the den wall with his tattoo is probably not “gee, is that anchor classical or impressionist?”  It seems a little weird … and should.  After all, if Uncle Joe liked to read, would that be justification to take a strip of his back and turn it into your favorite library lampshade?

Embryo “keepsakes” go one step further: not only are they reified post-mortem but their manufacture is the actual cause of death.  Removal from cryopreservation without implantation consigns the embryo to die.  The you’re you’ve convinced yourself your motives are benign neither make it all right nor legitimate using your baby as your fashion statement.

These actions bespeak a radically subjective confusion about the embryo. Mother A who wants to “memorialize” her miscarried embryo turns him into jewelry. Mother B who just wants not to be a mother happily leaves her “clump of cells” to Planned Parenthood, which has fought states like Indiana tooth and nail to overturn laws requiring respectful disposal of those remains (burial or cremation) rather than discarding them as “biological waste.”  If you didn’t know the mothers’ different intentions, then what you see in both cases is identical: a dead embryo. How they get valued depends on somebody else’s intentions, not anything that is different about them.

Does this “memorialization” also suggest something else abortionists vehemently deny: post-abortion syndrome?  Is it a kind of perverted desire not to “let go” of one’s discarding of one’s child, not wanting to part with a child your decisions made dead?  It is a whitewashed, sad sentimentality?  That process serves lots of purposes: sublimating the mother’s feelings; doing something with the surfeit of abandoned, embryos on ice with no clear futures; reinforcing the “choice” ethic that says how you feel about what you did is “your business,” as long as it does not suggest embryonic or fetal personhood?

In 1978, country singers Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson counseled, “Mammas Don’t’ Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”  Modern mammas have to resist the temptation of turning one’s babies into earrings.