Alabama’s largest hospital halted in-vitro fertilization (IVF) following a state Supreme Court ruling that held that frozen embryos are “children” legally protected under state law.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham health system lamented that the court decision could impact “patients’ attempts to have a baby through IVF,” in a statement.
The health system added that it “must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments.”
The court ruling, issued on Friday, settled a legal dispute between patients of an IVF clinic whose embryonic children were destroyed after being taken out of a cryogenic storage unit and mishandled. The patients filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the IVF clinic and hospital, alleging that embryonic children are protected by Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, a claim that Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed with.
In its ruling, the state Supreme Court affirmed that the law “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”
The Medical Association of the State of Alabama objected to the court decision, warning that it would limit access to IVF treatments in the future for fear of embryo mistreatment.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reproductive technologies such as IVF contributed to 91,906 live births throughout the U.S. in 2021. In Alabama, there were 407 live birth deliveries and 966 embryo transfers as a result of reproductive technologies used in the same year, a low survival rate after implantation, on par with the national average.
The Society for Reproductive Technology (SART) states that for “women under 35, the percentage of live births via IVF is 55.6%. Live births per first embryo transfer is 41.4%. With a later embryo transfer, the live births percentage is around 47%.“
The Alabama state Supreme Court ruling, however, brings into question what medical establishments should do with the more than one million frozen embryos currently held in storage across the United States.
