donating embryos for IVF

Dear Rabbi Halperin –

I have been doing some research and it seems like you a good person to ask this question of.

We are a couple who were blessed with one child and then had a lot of difficulty producing any more. We went through several years of fertility treatments and a lot of heartache, but thank G-d, we have been blessed with 2 more healthy children.

At this point, we no longer wish to go through any more fertility treatments. However, we do have several more embryos (all our own eggs and sperm) stored at our clinic from our IVF treatments. We have been debating what is the right thing to do with them. Then just recently we became re-aquainted with another Jewish couple whom we had not seen for a number of years. It turns out that they are experiencing fertility issues and have been unable to have any children. The wife is now over 40 and doctors are not giving her very good chances with traditional IVF. She is obviously very distressed at this situation. SO it occurred to us that we could donate our extra embryos to them if that were permissible. From my own limited research on this topic, I see that there are halachic issues with this, but it seems also like embryo donation is allowed under some circumstances. So we would like to know if this situation is permissible and under what conditions that might be so.

Thank you so much for your consideration.

b'shalom,

K