Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos legally qualify as living children.[1] As a result, the state's largest hospital system, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), has paused in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments as it determines whether patients or doctors could face criminal consequences for utilizing reproductive assistance.[2]
"We are saddened that this will impact our patients' attempt to have a baby through IVF," UAB spokeswoman Savannah Koplon wrote in a statement, as reported by AP News.
IVF relies on creating a number of fertilized embryos outside of the uterus and then implanting one or two of the healthiest ones at a time. Additional healthy embryos are often frozen for future use. This ruling calls into question whether providers and patients can continue to freeze the embryos created during fertility treatments and whether they could ever donate or destroy unused or abnormal embryos.
In the U.S., practitioners perform more than 413,000 assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles annually, including 168,000 egg or embryo banking cycles where the results are frozen for future use.[3] About 97,000 babies are born each year through the use of ART.
"If the policy outcomes mandated under this decision stand, the consequences will be profound," Paula Amato, M.D., president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said in a statement.[4] "Modern fertility care will be unavailable to the people of Alabama, needlessly blocking them from building the families they want."
What members of the What to Expect Community have to say
"I am an IVF patient and when Roe v. Wade was struck down, the whole IVF impact was resounding. Thankfully, I live in the Northeast and my embryos are stored in New York state where we haven't had to worry about such legislation. It boggles my mind for them to say that all embryos are unborn children. The reality is that most embryos have chromosomal abnormalities that make them incompatible with life! You could force someone to transfer 10 abnormal embryos and none of them would survive, so how is discarding them or donating them to science any different? Just one more way the men in the government want to control our reproductive rights." — klzjmz
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"I live in the South (not Alabama) and am worried something like this could happen in my state. I have three embryos in storage and am scared quite frankly." — sarahsb22
"[This is] why when we started our IVF journey in 2021, I pushed such an aggressive schedule. The doctor was astounded when I told her my concerns, my husband thought I was crazy ... yet here we are. We had to undergo multiple rounds to even get to retrieval and [intracytoplasmic sperm injection] where we got four viable embryos. Our first was born in December 2022, I'm delivering next month with our second and last. We will have two remaining frozen embryos we are not using, but we're planning to keep [them] in storage at least for now (as long as that remains legal here)." — TB29
"I just renewed my cryopreservation for another year, and now I regret it. I am moving on in life, I need to let them go. Even though I have paid, I still might make the hasty decision to discard them and not even play games with other choices. My embryos are in Georgia, so not too dissimilar from Alabama in terms of philosophies regarding 'life.'" — -TheCalculator-
"I am from Alabama, and I am horrified. I am embarrassed, but I am hopeful that the Senate will pass the proposed Access to Family Building Act … I cannot understand the level of inhumanity that allows a couple to bring a lawsuit that jeopardizes the very treatment that allowed themselves to become parents. I can’t understand the religious extremism that takes a pro-life stance to aim to eliminate the thousands of lives that are brought into our country every year through IVF. Modern medicine is a blessing and a miracle. When someone is diagnosed with cancer should we just accept that it must be God’s will and not provide chemotherapy or other life-saving intervention? Absurd. I want to be compassionate with people of all viewpoints, but I cannot understand." — ceooo
"I just can’t understand it at all. [As an] IVF mom to two beautiful girls, embryos in a petri dish are alive the same way a seed is alive. They have not been implanted into a uterus yet, they have no blood, no nervous system. Many of them are genetically abnormal and will result in miscarriages. But men who have no idea how the female reproductive system works are going to make laws about it … " — Cranberry53
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