Then They Came for I.V.F.
Fertility treatments freeze after Alabama Supreme Court's embryo ruling.
It has been an absolute shit show of late when it comes to assaults on women’s health and rights this week— and it’s not even Friday.
On Wednesday, an IVF clinic in Alabama became the first fertility clinic to halt services after the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Friday that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children.”
A spokesperson for the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility told AL.com that UAB is “saddened” for their patients who struggle with infertility and can no longer look to their IVF services at this time.
The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that three couples who, in 2021, accused a fertility clinic and hospital in Mobile, Alabama of accidentally destroying their embryos have grounds to sue for “wrongful death.”
According to the lawsuit, a patient at Mobile’s Center for Reproductive Medicine removed embryos from the cryogenic freezer but “the subzero temperatures at which the embryos had been stored freeze-burned the patient’s hand, causing the patient to drop the embryos on the floor, killing them.”
The case was initially dismissed by a circuit court judge before being taken up by the state’s Supreme Court. But if women in the world’s richest democracy, who are already dying from pregnancy-related complications in greater numbers than women in other ‘developed nations,’ now have to fight for their reproductive rights on the IVF front, what can we really say about the state of women’s rights?
UAB’s decision to suspend IVF services offers an ominous glimpse at the impacts that legal recognition of fetal and embryonic personhood will have on health care.
The Alabama ruling reminded me that when it comes to women’s rights, it’s an all out war in America that goes way beyond Roe v. Wade.
But we already knew that, didn’t we?