Her embryos or his?

Ten hours before the embryos were to be implanted in Augusta's womb, Randy emerged from their study and broke unfathomable news: Despite all she had endured, he couldn't go through with it.

The doctor's call announcing the creation of the embryos had crystallized nagging doubts about their marriage that he had harbored for years. He insisted on canceling the procedure and freezing the embryos while they attempted counseling to work through their differences.

"It was like somebody had just squeezed the life out of me," Augusta recalled. "My heart was heavy like it was going to bust."

Counseling failed, and in August 2003, 16 months after the canceled embryo transfer, the couple mediated the dissolution of their six-year marriage. She got the house in this Houston suburb, near NASA's Johnson Space Center, and most of the furnishings. He got the 32-inch Sony TV, a futon and dinette set, and the 1998 Honda Civic.

They could not agree, however, on the disposition of one piece of community property -- the three embryos of the original six that had survived the freezing process.

Augusta wanted to take possession and have them implanted, agreeing to release Randy from any financial or parental obligation. Randy wanted the embryos destroyed, or at least frozen indefinitely. He argued that even though he did not want to raise children with Augusta, he would never disavow his genetic offspring. As he would point out in court, the couple had initialed a cryopreservation consent form stipulating that should they divorce, any frozen embryos "shall be discarded."

Roman vs. Roman now rests with the Supreme Court of Texas, one of a number of divorce cases nationwide in which the custody dispute has revolved around microscopic clumps of cells that are considered -- by most states, at least -- to be property and not human life.

Advances in assisted reproduction have created a legal landscape that judges and lawmakers could hardly have envisioned before 1984, when an Australian baby became the first created from a frozen embryo (the first U.S. birth came two years later). Since then, in vitro fertilization, or IVF, has become an immensely popular solution to fertility problems worldwide.