First Baby Born Via IVF In U.S. Calls Out Alabama Ruling: ‘Embryos Are Not Children’

Elizabeth Carr fears that she’s an “endangered species” because of the Alabama Supreme Court’s controversial ruling on reproductive rights.

On Monday, WBUR-FM,Boston’s NPR news station, published an essay by Carr, who made headlines around the world in 1981 when she became the first baby to be born in the U.S. through in vitro fertilization. In her essay, Carr challenged the state court’s ruling that frozen embryos should legally be considered “children.”

“Last week’s ruling was clearly written without a true understanding of the IVF procedure and a total disregard for the science of assisted reproductive technology,” Carr wrote. “No one understands better than the infertility community that embryos are not children. Success in IVF means bringing home a baby, not solely creating embryos.”

Carr described embryos as “simply one of many complicated steps one has to take in order to even have a chance of having a live birth.”

She pointed out that IVF is “a complicated multi-step process” that not only includes “hormone injections, egg retrieval and an embryo transfer” but also demands “financial resources, timing, science and scheduling.”

“And now the Alabama Supreme Court has made it more challenging for Alabamians to have an IVF baby in 2024 than it was for my parents in 1981. Science should move us forward, not backward,” Carr wrote.

The Alabama Supreme Court made its ruling earlier this month after three Alabama couples sued a fertility clinic for wrongful death after a patient accessed the freezer their embryos were stored in and dropped them on the floor. The ruling, which is riddled with theology, now gives couples who lose frozen embryos kept at storage facilities or fertility clinics the power to sue for