The Alabama Supreme Court ruled [February 16] that frozen embryos are people and someone can be held liable for destroying them, a decision that reproductive rights advocates say could imperil in vitro fertilization (IVF) and affect the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on treatments like it each year.
Abortion rights advocates say the ruling is the “logical” next step for the antiabortion movement as it seeks to broadly define human life.
The court’s finding, they note, could have implications across the country for fertility treatments such as IVF — the medical procedure in which doctors extract eggs from ovaries and fertilize them with sperm outside the body, forming embryos that can subsequently be moved to the uterus — or even contraceptives.
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To give a patient the best chance at a pregnancy, [Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of reproductive rights group Pregnancy Justice] said, multiple embryos are created in the hopes that a patient can try again if an attempt at a pregnancy fails. As a result, as many eggs as possible are often fertilized and kept frozen. After a patient becomes pregnant, what to do with the remaining embryos can be an agonizing choice.
The Alabama ruling could make that choice harder, as parents or clinics ponder whether disposing of the fertilized eggs could make them liable for punitive damages, advocates noted.
