As is well known, couples trying to have children with the help of in vitro fertilization create multiple embryos, hoping to increase their chances of a successful pregnancy.
But over the years, millions of "leftover embryos" have been frozen and stored in labs. Untold numbers are left there indefinitely.
Now, fertility specialists and parents in Alabama are moving those frozen embryos out of state – or even destroying them – because they perceive a threat to their liberty from a state supreme court ruling earlier this year.
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act encompasses the negligent destruction of frozen embryos created through IVF.
The New York Times characterizes the ruling as part of an “emerging movement against” IVF that is “driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.”
Since the court ruling, The Times reported, “at least four of Alabama’s seven fertility clinics have hired biotech companies to move the cells elsewhere. A fifth clinic is working with a doctor in New York to discard embryos because of concerns about the legality of doing so in Alabama”:
Fertility patients outside of Alabama, too, are worried about how their precious embryos — specks of 70 to 200 cells barely visible to the human eye — might one day be affected by lawmakers who believe human life begins at conception. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, 14 states have passed total or near total abortion bans. And the Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted in June to oppose IVF, calling for the protection of “frozen embryonic human beings.”
The newspaper cited Diana Zucknick, a Texas mother, who decided to send a tank of liquid nitrogen holding five of her embryos to New York for safekeeping.
“In South Dakota, Jennifer Zabel destroyed two embryos because she feared the state would take control of them,” The Times continued. “And in Mississippi, Dr. Preston Parry said more of his fertility patients were choosing to make fewer embryos at a time, prolonging the typical IVF process in order to minimize leftover embryos.”
Three Alabama clinics are working with a company to move their embryos to warehouses in other states: Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, and Texas.
