How Alabama’s ruling that frozen embryos are ‘children’ could impact IVF
Ziegler: I think there’s been a broader strategy — the sort of next Roe v. Wade, if you will — for the anti-abortion movement. It is a recognition that a fetus or embryo is a person for all purposes, particularly for the purposes of the federal constitution. And while this isn’t a case about the federal constitution, I think you’ll see the anti-abortion movement making a gradual case that the more state courts — the more state laws — recognize a fetus or embryo as a person for different circumstances and reasons, the more compelling they can say is the case for fetal personhood under the constitution. The more compelling is their argument that a fetus is a rights holder and that liberal abortion laws or state abortion rights are impermissible.
Read more at National Public Radio, Inc.
Alabama Supreme Court rules frozen embryos are ‘children’ under state law
Dr. Paula Amato, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said a decision to treat frozen fertilized egg as the legal equivalent of a child or gestating fetus could limit the availability of modern health care.
“By insisting that these very different biological entities are legally equivalent, the best state-of-the-art fertility care will be made unavailable to the people of Alabama. No health care provider will be willing to provide treatments if those treatments may lead to civil or criminal charges,” Amato said.
Read more at Politico
Ala. hospital halts IVF after state’s high court ruled embryos are “children”
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) health system is halting in vitro fertilization treatment in the wake of a ruling by the state’s Supreme Court on Friday that deemed frozen embryos to be “children,” The ruling opens up anyone who destroys embryos to liability in a wrongful death lawsuit, according to multiple media reports.
Read more at Ars Technica
The Alabama Supreme Court opinion holding that embryos are children, explained
But the tortured legal reasoning animating Mack and Burdick-Aysenne should cause any medical facility pause before they rely on the explicit language of Alabama’s criminal statutes to determine if they can be prosecuted. If the court can hold that a criminal statute amends a different, unrelated civil statute, then there’s no guarantee it won’t read that criminal statute to exclude the words “in utero.”
Read more at Vox
Alabama’s supreme court ruled embryos are ‘extrauterine children’. IVF patients are worried
“If you’re a physician or an embryologist working in that clinic, you now stand ready to be charged with manslaughter or threatened with a wrongful death suit because one of the embryos didn’t happen to survive the freeze-thaw process,” Tipton said.
Read more at The Guardian
Doctors and patients fearfully proceed with IVF after Alabama court rules embryos are children
“The next step will be to say, ‘Well, if an embryo is a person [outside the uterus], clearly it’s a person in utero,” said Priscilla Smith, director of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School.
“I don’t want to be dramatic and say it’s totally Handmaid’s Tale, but more and more, you’re in the situation rather where the state controls your behavior,” Smith said.
Read more at NBC News