US Clinic Stops IVF Services After Court Rules Frozen Embryos Are Children

A US clinic has stopped IVF services after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children.

A US clinic has stopped IVF services after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children.

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The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos are children and a person could be held liable for accidentally destroying them. Following this, a major clinic in the US state paused its in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) over fears of criminal prosecution. The decision comes in the wake of the stringent abortion laws that the country is already battling and this could be yet another strike on women's reproductive health care.

Meanwhile, the University of Alabama Birmingham, which has one of the leading medical facilities in the state, said it would continue to retrieve eggs from women's ovaries but not proceed to the next step in the IVF process which required the eggs to be fertilised with sperm before they are implanted into the uterus.

"We are saddened that this will impact our patients' attempt to have a baby through IVF," the University of Alabama Birmingham said in a statement.

"But we 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," it added.

Doctors and activists have opined the ruling would have adverse and far-reaching consequences for fertility treatments in Alabama and beyond. But conservative groups welcomed the ruling saying even the tiniest embryo deserved legal protection.

The case of wrongful death was filed when three couples whose embryos were lost at a fertility clinic in 2020. Back then a patient had walked into the place where the embryos were stored and accidentally dropped them leading to their destruction. 

The couples decided to take legal action against the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Association, invoking the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. This law pertains to fetuses but does not explicitly cover embryos conceived through in-vitro fertilization.

Initially, a lower court dismissed the case, arguing that embryos did not meet the criteria of being considered persons or children, thus rendering a wrongful death lawsuit invalid.

The matter was then escalated to the Alabama Supreme Court for clarification on the applicability of the law in this context.

In a recent ruling, the court ruled in favor of the couples saying that embryos were considered as "children".

The court's decision asserted that the wrongful death law extended to "all unborn children, regardless of their location" and dubbed embryos, often preserved in cryogenic storage, as "extrauterine children".

Chief Justice Tom Parker, concurring with the majority opinion, stated, "Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be extinguished without diminishing His glory."