I’ve been waiting for this shoe to drop for about two years – and finally it has. The shoe in question was that we had gotten so good at the technology of in vitro fertilization, that parents who underwent the procedure were coming out of it with plenty of surplus frozen “opportunities.“

I say “opportunities” here, because every other word I can think of launches us into a frenzy of debate, accusations, fear, morality, legalities, politics and prejudice. So, let’s just stick with the word “opportunities” and see if we can’t get through this commentary without getting everyone riled up and thus, make a point on their behalf.

People who have gone through the in vitro process in recent years make comments like “We ended up with eight, we have our baby now, and there are seven more in deep freeze.” Or “We have two more to go. I think we’ll decide soon.” It seems that when it works, there are plenty of extras, and while exactly how many frozen opportunities there are can only be estimated, one number that’s been floated is 400,000. Whether that’s a good number or not, it’s completely believable.

Which means that 400,000 shoes have actually dropped all at one – not just one.

The potential futures for these opportunities are actually pretty straightforward: They can be implanted back in mom, they can be implanted in another woman, they can be left to thaw, losing all their potential to become a human life, or they can be donated to science – destination: stem cell research.

So, at the time that federal funding directed to stem cell research restricted activities to the so-called Presidential stem cell lines, private citizens were out there generating as many starter kits as anyone could imagine. And the biotech industry raised billions of dollars and started spending it on research, both presidential and otherwise.

The shoes all dropped when the President vetoed the recent expanded stem cell bill passed by both houses of Congress. And while the same old arguments were all trotted out, for the first time ever I heard people start talking about all these frozen opportunities, all out there now in suspended animation, real, and growing in numbers every day.

Two streams of conversation are new to the mainstream. The first is driven by religious belief. Some consider the thawing of a frozen opportunity as tantamount to murder, as heinous as donating it to science. For them, a life is a life is a life. But how can they mobilize? They couldn’t carry all these opportunities to term, even they had the go-ahead. The shear numbers are against them.

And the other new conversation surrounds those frozen opportunities who shall some day become walking, talking members of the human race.

Parents not only have test-tube babies, the multiple siblings are essentially the same chronological age, conceived within minutes of each other in a laboratory. Only some were frozen and implanted in succession, months and years later. For these opportunities, there’s calendar time, and then there’s biological time.

Here the conversation asks: If a living person was at one point a frozen opportunity, should they have the right to know it? If known, should they have the right to keep it private? More over, when they finally come to grips with the fact that that they spent some period of time in the deep freeze, will there be a psychological effect?

The President’s veto was just the impetus. The news is that these frozen opportunities have become real.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.