Another Alabama fertility clinic has stopped in vitro fertilization treatments after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are children.
“We have made the impossibly difficult decision to hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists,” Alabama Fertility Specialists wrote on Facebook Thursday. “We are contacting patients that will be affected today to find solutions for them and we are working as hard as we can to alert our legislators as to the far reaching negative impact of this ruling on the women of Alabama. At a time when we feel so powerless, advocacy and awareness is our strongest tools.”
Alabama Fertility Specialists is the second fertility clinic to halt IVF treatments since the state Supreme Court ruling. The health system at the University of Alabama at Birmingham halted treatment on Wednesday.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said in a statement shared Thursday that the Alabama Supreme Court decision is “only possible” because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“Across the nation, MAGA Republicans are inserting themselves into the most personal decisions a family can make, from contraception to IVF,” the statement read. “With their latest attack on reproductive freedom, these so-called pro-life Republicans are preventing loving couples from growing their families. If Donald Trump is elected, there is no question that he will impose his extreme anti-freedom agenda on the entire country.”
The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children after three couples sued an Alabama fertility clinic for wrongful death in 2020 after a hospital patient accessed their embryos and dropped them on the ground, and they were destroyed. A judge first dismissed the lawsuit, but then the state Supreme Court reversed that decision.
“[T]he Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified. It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation,” the ruling said. “It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”
IVF, which is a process in which a patient’s eggs are fertilized with sperm outside of the body and then implanted into the patient’s uterus, is at the center of the abortion debate. Because a patient only needs one egg to become pregnant, many times leftover eggs are discarded, leading anti-abortion activists to believe that’s murder.