On Feb.16, the Alabama Supreme Court passed a new law stating that frozen embryos created and stored in the process of in-vitro fertilization are considered children. If one were to destroy an embryo they would be punished, and the parents would be allowed to sue.
This law began in 2020 after a robbery at a storage facility for frozen embryos at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center in Mobile, Ala., which destroyed many of the embryos. Three couples had gone to Alabama’s Supreme Court, with the ruling being a wrongful death lawsuit. The couples sued the fertility clinic, with Justice Jay Mitchell writing in his ruling, “Unborn children are ‘children’ … Without exception based on developmental stage, physical location or any other ancillary characteristics.”
Since the ruling, many providers in Alabama have announced a pause on IVF treatments, sending residents scrambling to find clinics that would provide this service. The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama Fertility Services and The Center for Reproductive Medicine and their related hospital system Infirmary Health, all announced their pause on IVF treatment. However, Dr. Brett Davenport of the Fertility Institute of North Alabama announced his clinic would continue IVF, putting many patients at ease.
The question of whether this concept will reach national levels remains unanswered, but some states are adopting a concept of “fetal personhood” in their anti-abortion laws, which stems from the idea that the fetus should have comparable equal rights to a full-born child. With this law, states such as Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina are sending test results to law enforcement if they test for drug use — violating the mother’s privacy rights — and, in turn, getting the mother prosecuted for “child neglect.”
“In the state of Florida, there are already two bills that are proposing the same kind of personhood status … It’s going to affect providers of in vitro fertilization because it limits what we can or cannot do, and all of the advances that we made for the last 20 years … Will basically be nullified,” Reproductive Endocrinologist Dr. Armando Hernandez-Rey said.
If the law were to reach a more national scale, it could limit the rights and choices of many patients and create an embryo equivalent to “abortion tourism,” where women have to travel to a different state to get an abortion because their state does not provide them with that right.
“Destruction of embryos, while not ideal, …[ is something that does happen; it puts in jeopardy the way that we treat patients … Sometimes patients have surplus embryos … So they may destroy them, although we do recommend donating them to science or to another family, but ultimately it’s at the hands of the couple who had those embryos created in the first place,” Hernandez-Rey said.
