After Alabama Court Decision, Panic And Heartbreak In Fertility Clinics

Kate was scrolling through Facebook when she saw a news story about an Alabama court ruling on embryos. The 39-year-old Tennessean had been going to her fertility clinic across the border in Alabama for months, and she was exhausted. She and her husband had gone through several rounds of intrauterine insemination and in vitro fertilization, only for her first pregnancy to be nonviable.

She couldn’t bring herself to read the article. It had been months of doctor’s appointments, surgical procedures and daily hormone injections. The couple had already maxed out their credit cards and taken out loans to afford fertility treatment, which had cost them $14,000 in the last month alone.

“My initial feeling was panic,” Kate told HuffPost. Would the clinic close, she wondered? How would she pay for storage of her embryos? She started building a plan to move to a clinic in a different state, she told herself she’d quit her job if she had to.

Kate is one of the many women in Alabama deeply worried about how the ruling will impact her ability to have a child. The state is now hindering people from doing just that.

The sweeping state Supreme Court decision, released last week, grants embryos the same legal status as children — posing a direct legal threat to physicians and patients using in vitro fertilization.

IVF is a medical procedure where doctors induce ovulation and remove eggs from a patient and fertilize them with sperm outside the body. The resulting embryos can either be implanted into a patient’s uterus in the hopes of getting pregnant, or the embryos can be frozen for future use. Some embryos are usually discarded in the process – an action that now violates Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, a civil law dating