Originally published by The 19th.
Mary Dolan doesn’t live in Alabama. But she isn’t taking any chances.
Dolan, 35, lives in Tennessee, just one state away, and watched as an Alabama court halted in vitro fertilization until lawmakers let it resume.
IVF is legal in Tennessee, and as far as Dolan knows, there is no effort underway to change that. But she also knows that IVF, the most effective form of fertility treatment, likely offers her only chance of becoming a mom. She’s begun to worry: If an Alabama court made the regimen unavailable less than 200 miles away, then lawmakers in Nashville — who were quick to ban abortion when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and where Republicans run the legislature and occupy the governor’s mansion — could do the same thing.
So Dolan and her husband had a talk. They’ve done four egg retrievals so far; their frozen embryos are in a Tennessee clinic. They are planning one more retrieval. But if they can get off the waitlist, they’ll do their final retrieval and subsequent embryo cultivation in New York — a state where they feel more confident IVF will remain available.
It would offer a tiny bit of security when so little feels in Dolan’s control. Already, she feels like they’ve sacrificed so much: leaving her job in education to work in a warehouse return center that offered fertility benefits, postponing removal of the lead paint in their home to save up for all the medical bills. Estimates of the average cost of just one IVF cycle run anywhere from $12,400 to closer to $25,000 — and patients can require multiple cycles to get pregnant. On top of that, embryo storage can cost $1,000 a year or more.
Medicaid, which insures low-income people, does not cover IVF in any of the 50 states or Washington, D.C. Only 14 have laws requiring private insurance to do so.
“My husband and I feel like we’ve put our lives on hold in so many ways to try to create embryos and hope we can have a child someday,” Dolan said. “Not only do we have to worry about maybe an embryo transfer doesn’t work or it doesn’t survive the thaw or things like that, but there’s also this worry of: What if a ruling comes out that prevents us from using our embryos, or the clinics close down?”
For IVF patients in states that have moved to ban or heavily restrict abortion, the Alabama ruling felt like a nightmare. The state legislature’s efforts to make treatment available again have not allayed fears that a similar decision could cut off access in other states. That would take a physically and psychologically draining treatment that some have struggled to afford — cutting expenses, drawing money out of savings, or even changing jobs for the promise of fertility........