Her embryos or his?

On the night before the scheduled embryo transfer, the couple went out for Chinese food. Upon returning home, Augusta changed into her nightgown and settled in to watch the news. That is when Randy told her they needed to talk, and presented her with a handwritten bill of complaints. Foremost was his claim that he perceived her as being "hostile to God."

There had been minor disputes over religion in the past. Augusta had complained about the tithes Randy gave to a family that he considered his spiritual advisors. And Randy -- a Pentecostalist but not a regular churchgoer -- had bristled at Augusta's occasional criticism of televangelists. The previous year, Randy had confided his concerns about Augusta's faith to her sister, but he had never mustered the courage to confront his wife.

Randy said it was difficult for him to explain exactly how and when his perception of his wife and their marriage had changed. But he said the creation of the embryos, and the permanence they might bring to their relationship, finally moved him to act.

"The reality of my thoughts and feelings hadn't really come together until that moment," he said. "I woke up from a dead sleep, staring at the ceiling, saying, 'Oh, gosh, something's not right.' I really was like a deer in the headlights. I thought, 'This is a reality like no other reality.' "

Augusta was bewildered, furious and hysterical. She thought Randy sounded crazy, and chafed at his assertions that the Bible required her to submit to his will. She could not believe that he had allowed her to undergo surgery and watched as she injected herself twice daily with hormones without saying a word.

"Why put somebody in that situation?" she asked. She said she stayed up all night crying. The next morning, they showed up at the Center of Reproductive Medicine and instructed Dr. Vicki L. Schnell to freeze the embryos.

Three weeks earlier, the couple had signed consent forms in Schnell's office, initialing options that called for frozen embryos to be discarded in case of divorce and awarded to the surviving spouse in case of death. Randy said they briefly discussed the options; Augusta said that there was no discussion and that she signed almost unthinkingly.

Augusta said she understood the consent to cover only those embryos that might remain after the initial implantation. Because she could not possibly predict that Randy would withdraw, it never occurred to her that signing the form might effectively deny her all of the embryos.