Third Ala. IVF clinic halts operation after state high court ruling

Third Ala. IVF clinic halts operation after state high court ruling

A third Alabama in vitro fertilization clinic has halted treatment as the fallout from last week’s state Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are legally children continues to disrupt IVF access across the state.

The Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, one of just seven IVF clinics statewide, announced Thursday that it had paused IVF procedures in light of the court ruling. Mark Nix, president and CEO of the clinic’s parent company, Infirmary Health, said in a Thursday statement the court decision “has sadly left us with no choice.”

“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 added.

The number of clinics providing comprehensive IVF treatment in Alabama has now been slashed by nearly half since the Alabama Supreme Court’s Feb. 16 ruling. (While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports eight IVF clinics in Alabama, the owner of one of the listed clinics said he closed his practice and merged with another, putting the number at seven).

On Wednesday, the state’s largest hospital and largest fertility clinic were the first to announce they were pausing aspects of their IVF services. A spokesperson for the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University of Alabama at Birmingham said the clinic was pausing all IVF treatment, while a partner at Alabama Fertility confirmed her clinic canceled embryo transfers but was still moving forward with treatments such as egg retrieval.

Among the four remaining clinics, three said they would halt only frozen embryo disposal; the status of a fourth, Birmingham-based Innovative Fertility Specialists, could not be confirmed Thursday despite requests for comment from The Washington Post.

“We’re going to keep proceeding as before with all IVF — save for disposal,” said Andrew Harper, a partner at Huntsville Reproductive Medicine.

The Alabama Center for Reproductive Medicine, which has locations in Birmingham and Montgomery, said it is continuing IVF processes, as did the Huntsville-based Fertility Institute of North Alabama.

“We are running as normal other than discarding embryos,” a spokesperson for FINA told The Washington Post.

Fertility doctors and their patients are scrambling to understand the broader implications of the court ruling, including the legal liability of discarding frozen embryos — a routine part of the IVF process for embryos that are unsuitable for transfer or will go unused — since they are now considered to be equivalent to children in Alabama.

The court’s ruling stemmed from a 2020 incident at The Center for Reproductive Medicine’s Mobile facility in which a wandering patient accessed the frozen embryos of three couples and dropped them on the floor, destroying them. The couples filed wrongful-death lawsuits against the center; the complaints were dismissed by a lower court before the Alabama Supreme Court reversed the decision.

The court ruling by the all-Republican justices held that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applied to all unborn children, without exceptions, and called frozen embryos “extrauterine children.” The decision has alarmed medical professionals and reproductive rights advocates, who criticized it as being grounded in religion and not science.

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker extensively quoted scripture as he argued the people of Alabama have embraced the notion that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

President Biden on Thursday spoke out against the Alabama decision, calling it a “direct result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”

“The disregard for women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and their families is outrageous and unacceptable,” Biden said in a statement.

Alabama Fertility, which confirmed Wednesday that it was pausing treatment, said in a statement Thursday that their decision was “due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists.” In a Facebook post, the clinic said it was contacting affected patients and would find solutions for them. It also reassured patients the clinic was working to alert state lawmakers to “the far reaching negative impact of this ruling on the women of Alabama.”

“AFS will not close,” the statement concluded. “We will continue to fight for our patients and the families of Alabama.”