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.<\/p>\n
Williams\u2019s reply? Hell no. \u201cLife does begin at conception either in the womb or in the IVF clinic,\u201d 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\u2019t resist a little moralizing also. \u201cI admit it is an unusual question for someone who struggled to have children and wants children to ask the question \u2018can I discard my embryos\u2019 but I hope this answers your questions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Williams may be just one politician but, make no mistake, he\u2019s no outlier when it comes to this issue. Anti-abortion extremists aren\u2019t going to wage war on IVF, they\u2019re already doing so. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for people to fathom that this is actually happening,\u201d Chambers told the feminist journalist Jessica Valenti. \u201cThis is real, and it\u2019s happening right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read more of Arwa Mahdawi’s opinion piece at The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ivf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377,"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-rights-to-speak-of.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}