The Fight For IVF Is Far From Over

Amanda Zurawski made national news because she experienced every pregnant person’s nightmare.

In 2022, the Texas native was told her pregnancy was nonviable at 17 weeks. But because her fetus still had cardiac activity, doctors refused to provide an abortion, fearing criminal and civil punishment under the state’s near-total abortion ban. After days of waiting to get sick enough for emergency care, Zurawski became septic and the hospital agreed to induce labor.

The experience left Zurawski in the intensive care unit with severe damage to her reproductive organs, leaving her unable to carry a future pregnancy to term. She was one of 20 women who sued the state of Texas because they were denied medically necessary abortions; the state Supreme Court recently ruled against them.

Zurawski and her husband have since turned to in vitro fertilization and surrogacy to start their family, but those services are in peril now, too.

The Texas Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to take a case that could threaten IVF access. Though the details of the case are not identical, it could have a similar outcome to the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that ruled frozen embryos should be legally defined as children — and that discarding them, as is common in the IVF process, would be equivalent to causing the death of a child.

The ruling, announced in February, immediately caused several IVF clinics in the state to pause services. Shortly thereafter, the state legislature stepped in and passed a bill to protect IVF in Alabama.

Terrified that what happened in Alabama could happen in her home state, Zurawski transported her frozen embryos out of Texas — a time-consuming and expensive move.

“Even though the Alabama decision was