By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff
Azeen Ghorayshi reported from Birmingham, Ala., and Sarah Kliff from Washington, D.C.
Aug. 12, 2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos were “unborn children.” Since then, at least four of Alabama’s seven fertility clinics have hired biotech companies to move the cells elsewhere. A fifth clinic is working with a doctor in New York to discard embryos because of concerns about the legality of doing so in Alabama.
Fertility patients outside of Alabama, too, are worried about how their precious embryos specks of 70 to 200 cells barely visible to the human eye might one day be affected by lawmakers who believe human life begins at conception. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, 14 states have passed total or near total abortion bans. And the Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted in June to oppose I.V.F., calling for the protection of “frozen embryonic human beings.”
