![]() ![]() "The thing about these trigger laws that I’m worrying about is that they’re the tip of the iceberg," Crockin said. Ozonian said IVF clinics that partner with his company, most of which are in California, have already heard some prospective patients say they’re "afraid to now go through treatment, given some of those legislation changes."Įven if current laws wind up having no impact on IVF, some legal experts wonder whether future policies could. "Now you have to worry about: What are the officials saying? What is the government going to do? So it’s adding this huge stress component that wasn’t present before." It’s emotionally draining and challenging at all levels," said Maria Costantini-Ferrando, a reproductive endocrinologist at Reproductive Medicine Associates in New Jersey. In Idaho, the attorney general's office said it will be up to individual prosecutors in each of the state's 44 counties to decide how to enforce its abortion ban, which is set to go into effect in less than 30 days. Tennessee's directed NBC News to the language in its trigger law, and Mississippi’s pointed to a section of the state code. North Dakota’s attorney general office referred NBC News to a letter enforcing the state's ban but declined to comment further. "If legislators enact personhood laws, they will substantially undermine IVF patients’ ability to make decisions about their care, including what to do with frozen embryos," said Karla Torres, senior human rights counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights.Īttorneys general offices in Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota and Texas did not respond to inquiries about whether their abortion bans could affect IVF. Or in some cases, patients who don’t intend to store or use an embryo might be forced to relinquish control over it to a doctor or clinic, as is already the case under Louisiana law. That might even apply, legal experts said, to people who damage an embryo in a lab or clinic. It would be considered homicide," said Priscilla Smith, director of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School. "If a law is written to establish personhood of a fertilized egg or an embryo, for example, then discarding an embryo would violate that law. But some lawyers are concerned nonetheless about "personhood" laws that treat a fertilized egg as a human being. Most existing or expected state abortion bans refer specifically to ending a pregnancy, Crockin said, so they shouldn’t apply to IVF. ![]() Some people rely on IVF as a solution to fertility challenges, while others use it to avoid passing on a genetic disorder, since embryos can be tested before implantation. Patients often choose to store additional frozen embryos for future IVF cycles. The practice of IVF involves combining sperm and eggs to create embryos in a lab, then implanting one or more of those embryos in a person’s uterus. "It’s going to depend on the language of the statute and the tenacity of individual prosecutors who are interpreting it." Could an embryo be considered a person? "The devil is in the details," she added. "What happens to IVF pre-implantation embryos in the freezers? Can couples, patients decide to discard them or not?" said Susan Crockin, a legal scholar at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Ivan Couronne / AFP via Getty Images file An embryologist shows an ovocyte after it was inseminated at the Virginia Center for Reproductive Medicine on Jin Reston, Va. So some lawyers and fertility clinics aren’t convinced that the new restrictions will leave the IVF process untouched. In Arkansas' case, the office of state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge told NBC News that the ban "has no implications for IVF treatments." Attorneys general offices in Alabama and Oklahoma said the same of their laws.īut other states have not yet clarified how far their abortion bans extend, and abortion laws don't generally address the issue of frozen embryos directly. "But everybody across the country, including us in Arkansas, is very concerned about the potential." "I don’t know whether the people who wrote this law fully understood the downstream effects of it," he said. ![]()
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