Last month, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that couples who tried in vitro fertilization (IVF) and lost frozen embryos in an accident at a facility in Mobile, Ala., can sue under the state’s wrongful death law.
Since the ruling, some are concerned the courts and state lawmakers may consider embryos as children and afford them legal protections. Three Alabama providers have paused their IVF treatments while they review the legal implications.
Bryant Liggett and Erin Attaway, co-founders of The Fertility Resort in Pensacola, have already seen an impact on their clients because Mobile has been a large provider of IVF treatments along the Gulf Coast.
“What’s happening in Alabama is affecting people from lots of other states who might be traveling to Mobile, Birmingham, or Huntsville for treatment,” Attaway said. “So, what happens in Alabama doesn’t stay in Alabama.”
What is IVF treatment?
She explained the IVF treatment in layman’s terms. “Anybody who’s having a hard time conceiving naturally, they can go to an IVF clinic, and those doctors are going to take eggs from a female and sperm from a male. They’re going to put it together and generate embryos.”
Attaway continued, “The necessity of freezing those embryos, that’s just part of it. There’s no way to store them or to keep them alive unless you put them on this. So, to say that they are people now and they can’t be cryopreserved or all the other implications that we’re discussing, really essentially destroys the process. It makes it so that you would only be able to use what’s viable in the moment, and the time and expense and the whole system of how IVF works would really make it unattainable for most people.”
Liggett said, “For me personally, I went through three rounds of IVF, and we made 15 total embryos, and I’ve had zero live births from those embryos. If that kind of puts this in perspective, embryos do not equal baby. They just don’t. We have tried and tried and tried.”
She added, “It just upsets me when I hear people talking about who are not knowledgeable of what the actual mechanical factors are that go into IVF, what the actual live birth rate is, and how many embryos it takes to create life. It doesn’t equate right.”
Attaway agreed. “They have confused the difference between a potential person and an actual person that has rights. IVF clinics are not nurseries. It’s unfair to try to put those kinds of regulations on them when they’re doing their absolute best to help bring babies into the world.”
The Fertility Resort
The Fertility Resort was created to help women navigate fertility issues. Liggett said, “One of the things that people don’t really talk about when it comes to IVF infertility is you just don’t know what you don’t know until you’re in it. And then when you’re thrown in it, it’s a lot. We provide tools and resources to help you actually optimize your journey, whether that’s being fertility coaching, nutrition coaching, all of those types of things like how to adjust your lifestyle to make your fertility journey as impactful as possible.”
She added, “We have our licensed mental health providers who have been through infertility journeys themselves, who help guide our members to having a holistic, healthy, and happy journey, which is really hard to attain.”
They have a podcast – Protected Space.
Here is my interview with them – listen here.
