More IVF providers in Ala. pause treatment after ruling
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Additional in vitro fertilization providers in Alabama paused parts of their treatment Thursday, sending patients scrambling to make other plans after the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are legally considered children.
Alabama Fertility Services said in a statement that it has “made the impossibly difficult decision to hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists.”
The Center for Reproductive Medicine at Mobile Infirmary also decided to pause IVF treatment because of the ruling.
The decisions come a day after the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system said in a statement that it was pausing IVF treatments so it could evaluate whether its patients or doctors could face criminal charges or punitive damages.
“We are contacting patients that will be affected today to find solutions for them and we are working as hard as we can to alert our legislators as to the far reaching negative impact of this ruling on the women of Alabama,” Alabama Fertility said. “AFS will not close. We will continue to fight for our patients and the families of Alabama.”
Mobile Infirmary, a hospital in the Infirmary Health system, decided the state Supreme Court ruling left the provider with no choice but to pause treatments, system President and CEO Mark Nix said in a statement. “We understand the burden this places on deserving families who want to bring babies into this world and who have no alternative options for conceiving,” he said.
Doctors and patients have been grappling with shock and fear this week as they try to determine what they can and can’t do after the ruling by the all-Republican Alabama Supreme Court that raises questions about the future of IVF.
Alabama Fertility Services’ decision left Gabby Goidel, who was days from an expected egg retrieval, calling clinics across the South looking for a place to continue IVF care. “I freaked out. I started crying. I felt in an extreme limbo state. They did not have all the answers. I did not obviously have any answers,” she said.
The Alabama ruling came down Feb. 16, the same day Goidel began a 10-day series of injections ahead of egg retrieval, with the hopes of getting pregnant through IVF next month. Goidel, who experienced three miscarriages and turned to IVF as a way she and her husband could fulfill their dream of becoming parents, found a place in Texas that will continue her care and planned to travel there Thursday night.
“It’s not pro-family in any way,” Goidel said of the Alabama ruling.
Dr. Brett Davenport, a doctor at Fertility Institute of North Alabama, posted a video to social media Wednesday urging his patients not to panic, saying that IVF care would continue
“We are still going to perform IVF as we always have,” Davenport said in the video.
Justices, citing language in the Alabama Constitution that the state recognizes the “rights of the unborn child,” said three couples could sue for wrongful death when their frozen embryos were destroyed in a accident at a storage facility.
“Unborn children are ‘children’ ... without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics,” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in last week’s majority ruling. Mitchell said the court had previously ruled that a fetus killed when a woman is pregnant is covered under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act and nothing excludes “extrauterine children from the Act’s coverage.”
Although the Alabama case centered on whether embryos were covered under the wrongful death of a minor statute, some said treating the embryo as a child could have broader implications.
Rachel Rebouche, dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, sees the ruling as “emblematic of the long march toward fetal personhood.”