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Human embryos are considered people in Alabama because of that ruling. In IVF, multiple ova are fertilized outside the body to later be planted in the mother. This immediately begins the process of cell replication, turning them into embryos. With every fertilized embryo now considered a fully fledged person, that means that they all have to be preserved and birthed or the law would consider the loss of any of them to be murder.
The ruling states that embryos are “people” so those frozen embryos that people store are people. Some embryos were accidentally damaged at a facility, and now they can be charged with negligent homicide. That changes everything for the facility’s risk of doing business.
So IVF is a method of fertility treatment that often results in multiple viable embryos produced. The embryos that don’t get implanted are frozen so that they remain in stasis and stored away to potentially be implanted later if the couple wants to.
There was an incident where a person gained access to the freezer where the embryos were stored, handled them, burned himself, and dropped them on the floor. One of the couples whose embryos were destroyed sued the fertility clinic under Alabama’s wrongful death of a minor act. The defense argued that frozen embryos are not minor children, and the court agreed. The case got appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court who overturned the previous ruling thus making frozen embryos children as a matter of law.
Many fertility clinics in Alabama have paused IVF because they don’t want to be responsible for frozen embryos if they’re legally children.
Its an argument that life starts at conception.
So every sperm+egg combo made for implantation in the lab is now considered a person.
The process of thawing and implanting the fertilized egg can and does result in some loss of these implanted eggs. Which would, by these new laws, be considered murder or manslaughter or who knows.
You have to imagine the stress of being a fertility specialist and holding onto someones only chance of having a family is already stressful. Now imagine being arrested for a normal /frequent part of the job.
Essentially these fertility places are limiting services right now because they need to protect their staff.
Its a shame because some people rely on IVF as their last chance to conceive their own biological children.
It also opens up scary questions like: who’s responsible for the forever storage of these frozen samples, and if this goes on to be challenged at a federal legal level, (which is likely -as people want access to the health care theyve paid for), will the very religiously rooted higher level governement in the states make this federal law across *all* the states.
Which has further impacts on everything for women: Their access to birth control, their chances of being arrested for spontaneous abortions (miscarriages), their chances of being denied medical abortions for embryos that arent compatible with life (and therefore a painful death due to sepsis or hemorrhage for the pregnant person) and other impacts like their access to staff who provides this type of care (Ob/Gyn doctors. )
Ex: As seen in texas – specialists leave. They dont want to be accused of or have to defend their every medical judgement between them and their many many patients. This creates healthcare deserts for women and also leaves women to die of complications or carry unwanted children. Which generally isnt something that supports a healthy childhood or abuse free relationships.
It has even more knock on effects but most are negative and generally impact women and children unfairly.
The only way anyone can justify an anti-abortion law is if a human embryo is a human being with full rights.
In IVF fertilization, you get as many as of the mother’s eggs as you can and fertilize a bunch at a time. The reason you do this is because getting the fertilized egg (embryo) into the the mother’s womb has a low success rate.
If you have anti-abortion laws that require the recognition of an embryo as a human with full rights on the one hand, and then you have a medical process that produces a bunch of humans, and then kills most of them, you have a legal problem. Any discarded embryo, for any reason, is murder.
And there you have it. You can have anti-abortion laws that don’t take into account fetal viability, or you can have IVF. You can’t have both. There’s going to be a whole lot of crazy gyrations to support both, because poor people are most affected by anti-abortion laws (and we know poor people don’t matter), but IVF affects rich people, and so the Alabama government is going to do whatever it takes to support the rich oeople.
A couple had frozen embryos (fertilized eggs) that were accidentally destroyed. That is tragic as people who go through IVF will often struggle to get any viable embryos. They sued for wrongful death, which was appealed as there was no death under the common understanding of the term. The Alabama Supreme Court relied on some questionable wording in an old law to allow the suit to continue saying the law protects ‘extra uterine children’ which means all frozen embryos might be considered children. That is risky for IVF providers for obvious reasons.
The case garners a lot of attention because the Chief Justice’s concurring opinion included irrelevant inflammatory religious quotes which might actually form the basis of a novel civil rights appeal.
Traditional IVF fertilizes up to a dozen eggs at a time and grows the embryos for 4 or 5 days. At that point they transfer 1-2 embryos into the mother to attempt implantation/pregnancy. The remainder are frozen and can be thawed for use down the road if the first attempt is unsuccessful
The new rules basically mean that they won’t be able to save embryos months to month and should only fertilize eggs intended for transfer.
It says embryos are people. The IVF process creates embryos, only some of which get used, and the rest get a treatment not really deserving of a person.
The problem it creates for IVF is from a practical point of view you need to create multiple embryos.
The process is you take multiple eggs from the mother, try to fertilize them all, wait 48h and pick the 1 or 2 that are growing the healthiest to implant. Possibly you also need to do generic screening if the parents have a fatal gene combination for the child.
If these fertilized embryos are people then the clinic would have to do only one egg at a time. IVF could need monthly attempts for maybe even years at a time for a successful pregnancy.
It just wouldn’t be practical anymore.
Can you freeze the sperm and egg separately?
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