Second Alabama provider pauses IVF treatments after embryo ruling

Alabama Fertility. Photograph: Google Maps

A second Alabama provider announced that it will pause its in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments on Thursday, just days after the state supreme court ruled in a first-of-its-kind decision that embryos are “extrauterine children”.

“We have made the impossibly difficult decision to hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists,” Alabama Fertility said in a post to its Instagram account. “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.”

The clinic said it does not plan to close entirely, and urged people to check back in for “advocacy opportunities”.

Alabama Fertility is at least the second IVF provider to announce that it would suspend its IVF procedures after the University of Alabama at Birmingham Wednesday said it would pause treatments in the wake of the court ruling. A spokesperson for the university, the largest healthcare provider in the state, said the institution is “saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments”.

The Alabama supreme court ruling stemmed from two wrongful death lawsuits brought against an IVF clinic after several people’s frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed. The clinic pushed back against the lawsuits, arguing that Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act did not apply to frozen embryos, but the state supreme court ruled that the act does indeed apply.

“The central question presented in these consolidated appeals, which involve the death of embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, is whether the act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children – that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed,” Alabama supreme court justice Jay Mitchell wrote. “Under existing black-letter law, the answer to that question is no: the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”

IVF patients and advocates have vigorously opposed the ruling, which they say did not deal with the vast practical implications of legally recognizing frozen embryos as people. Doctors at Alabama Fertility told the Guardian earlier this week that the ruling threatened to upend several steps of the IVF process.

“Are we just at a point where we have to move our entire practice out of state, because we can no longer safely provide the quality or standard of care that we hold ourselves to?” one of the clinic’s doctors, Dr Michael C Allemand, said. “Our patients in this state deserve the same chance to have a genetic child if they want to have one as any person in any other state. And that’s being threatened by this.”