Hopeful parents in Alabama are watching and waiting for Gov. Kay Ivey’s signature after Alabama’s legislature pushed through bills meant to protect in vitro fertilization (IVF). The two bills, from both the House and Senate, were introduced less than two weeks after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos were children, making their destruction, a common byproduct of the IVF process, illegal.
As a result of the ruling, the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB), the largest hospital in the state, and other regional clinics put their IVF treatments on pause. Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, called the ruling and its impact on patients “devastating.”
Dr. Jenna McCarthy, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist at IVFMD.
But experts agree that it isn’t just IVF patients who might suffer thanks to this ruling. Regional medicine as a whole could also take a hit, as medical students might decide to pursue fertility studies in other states.
“It’s one of the things we were concerned about, that [the ruling] could have an impact on medical students in residence, not just in Alabama but other places, even though we know each state is different,” said Dr. Jenna McCarthy, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist at IVFMD in Jupiter, FL. “We want other young, brilliant minds to continue into reproductive endocrinology and infertility.”
IVF is a costly procedure that can take weeks to months to complete, with no guarantee of pregnancy at the end. According to 2021 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only about 27% of IVF cycles in that year resulted in pregnancy, and not all those pregnancies lasted to term.
“IVF is a numbers game,” said McCarthy, which is why multiple embryos are used in a patient’s care. “There may be a misconception that creating a high number of embryos is unnecessary, but in reality, it’s the right number of embryos for us to create the family [patients] have been dreaming of.”
