The day before the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created and used for in vitro fertilization are children, my wife, Gabby, and I were greenlighted by our doctors to begin the IVF process. We live in Alabama.
That Friday evening, Feb. 16, 2024, unaware of the ruling, Gabby started taking her stimulation medications, worth roughly US$4,000 in total. We didn’t hear about the decision until Sunday morning, Feb. 18. By then, she had taken four injections – or two doses – of each of the stimulation medications.
For those who don’t know, the IVF process is a winding journey full of tests, bloodwork and bills. An IVF patient takes hormones for eight to 14 days to stimulate their ovaries to produce many mature eggs. The mature eggs are then retrieved via a minor surgical procedure and fertilized with sperm in a lab. The newly created embryos are monitored, sometimes biopsied and frozen for genetic testing, and then implanted, usually one at a time, in the uterus. From injection to implantation, one round of IVF takes four to eight weeks.
IVF can be as stressful as it is exciting. However, the potential of having a successful pregnancy and our own child at the end of the process, we hoped, would make it all worth it. The decision by the Alabama Supreme Court threw our dreams up in the air.
I study politics – I don’t practice it. I’m not involved in state or local government. I’m a scholar, not an activist or an advocate. But now one of the most intimate, personal events of our lives had been turned into a political event by the state’s highest court. As a result, I became something else, too, which I had not been before: an activist.
Throughout the process of creating, growing and testing embryos in a lab, as many as 50% to 70% of embryos can be lost. Similarly, in the preimplantation stage of natural pregnancies, many embryos don’t survive.
If embryos are children, as the court ruled, then fertility clinics and patients would be exposed to an immense amount of potential legal liability. Under this new........