Sara Chambers, a 25-year-old from Tennessee who is currently going through IVF, had this very question. Tennessee is one of the most restrictive states when it comes to reproductive rights: the disingenuously named Human Life Protection Act essentially outlaws abortion and declares that life begins at fertilization not implantation. Wondering what the law meant for her treatment, Chambers emailed her representative, Ryan Williams, asking whether she could discard her embryos without it being considered an abortion.
Williams’s reply? Hell no. “Life does begin at conception either in the womb or in the IVF clinic,” Williams told her Chambers in an email she shared on a viral TikTok video; if a doctor got rid of those embryos it would be a crime. Williams couldn’t resist a little moralizing also. “I admit it is an unusual question for someone who struggled to have children and wants children to ask the question ‘can I discard my embryos’ but I hope this answers your questions,” he said.
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Williams may be just one politician but, make no mistake, he’s no outlier when it comes to this issue. Anti-abortion extremists aren’t going to wage war on IVF, they’re already doing so. “It’s hard for people to fathom that this is actually happening,” Chambers told the feminist journalist Jessica Valenti. “This is real, and it’s happening right now.”
Read more of Arwa Mahdawi’s opinion piece at The Guardian