I Had No Good Options For My Frozen Embryos. Now, In Alabama, What I Did With Them Could Be Illegal.

For me, getting pregnant involved years of doctors’ visits, fertility drugs and false hopes. Fortunately, my story has a happy ending. Thanks to in vitro fertilization, I have two healthy sons who fill my life with joy and ensure I can’t walk through the house without stepping on a Lego or a plastic dinosaur.

Then, last year, after deciding our family was complete — because honestly, some days even two kids feels like too many — my husband and I made the excruciating choice to have our two remaining frozen embryos destroyed. And as with all things fertility-related, that decision was complicated.

Deciding what to do

According to our Atlanta-based clinic, which was charging us hundreds of dollars per month to store the embryos, our choices were to thaw and destroy them, donate them for scientific research or donate them to another couple.

Initially we ruled out discarding them; it felt wrong to dump something we’d worked so hard to create from our own bodies into the proverbial trash. I also couldn’t stomach the thought of donating them to another couple and then knowing my DNA might be somewhere out there in the world. That left one option: donating our embryos to scientific research.

But while most fertility clinics list donating embryos to science as an option, what they don’t tell you is that this is nearly impossible to do. Our clinic, for example, provided a list of five organizations to contact. Four of them were no longer accepting embryos, and the fifth declined to accept ours because we live in Georgia, which, in 2019, passed an ultra-conservative law about when “personhood” begins.

Under the 2019 law, a human embryo is a legally recognized, legally protected person in Georgia, with all the rights and