Alabama's Embryo Ruling and What It Means for the Future of IVF

glamour.com:

Glamour spoke with Sara Ainsworth J.D., senior legal and policy director at the nonprofit organization : Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, which provides legal services regarding reproductive rights; and Cardin Cone, who conceived her first child, a son, through IVF at Alabama Fertility (a fertility clinic which has following the ruling), and is trying to conceive another.As detailed in the state , this began when several frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed by a hospital patient in Alabama in 2020.

The three couples whose embryos were destroyed then sued the fertility clinic for “wrongful death of a minor.”On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos do legally count as children.

Specifically, the opinion referred to these embryos as Chief Justice Tom Parker, in his concurring opinion, , “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” which raised some eyebrows for obvious reasons.In effect, this would make IVF as it is currently practiced basically impossible, says Ainsworth.The way IVF usually works is like this: A doctor retrieves eggs from a person’s ovaries, which are then fertilized by sperm in a lab to create as many embryos as possible.

One or more of the embryos with the best chance at survival are then implanted in a human uterus in a process referred to as the transfer.