Infertility patients fear abortion bans could affect access to IVF

After battling with infertility for several years, Melissa says she finally saw a glimmer of hope through in vitro fertilization. She and her husband started working with a fertility center in Grand Rapids, Mich., in March 2021 and have produced and frozen several embryos. Melissa hopes to eventually get pregnant for the second time this winter. But when the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling overturning Roe v. Wade came down, she started to worry."I'm sitting here desperate for babies — desperate," she says. "And this can seriously impact whether I can grow my family, whether I can afford to, whether I want to risk it."NPR has agreed to use only her first name because she's concerned about potential retaliation from abortion opponents. Melissa's fear is that a Michigan law banning abortion (which is currently in legal limbo) could potentially put fertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization, in jeopardy. People in other states with abortion bans or pending bans have similar worries. Their concern could be very real, says Judith Daar, a law professor at Northern Kentucky University with expertise in reproductive health. She says when the Supreme Court's ruling overturning Roe v. Wade made reference to "unborn human beings," it indirectly raised the issue of IVF. And it will be up to state legislatures to determine how abortion laws affect fertility treatments."If the legislature does view the unborn human life at its earliest moments as something worthy of protection over other interests, including the interest of patients and forming their families, then laws could move forward that are restrictive to in vitro fertilization," she says. During IVF, doctors collect eggs from a patient's ovaries and fertilize them with sperm in a lab to create embryos. They either transfer those embryos to a uterus, discard them or freeze them to be used later. A handful of state abortion bans define life as beginning at fertilization, though they don't specifically target the process of IVF. Other states are attempting to pass legislation that would grant embryos, fetuses and fertilized eggs personhood rights and in some cases constitutional rights. Such laws would "pose a concrete threat to the routine practice of IVF," says Daar. The concern is that these laws deem a frozen embryo a human life and that doing things like genetic testing on it during the IVF process, or discarding it, could become illegal."If an early embryo is deemed a person for purposes of legal rights and protections, any action short of transfer to the uterus could be seen as violating its right to life under these new laws," Daar says. Michigan's 1931 law banning abortion is paused as the courts consider a lawsuit that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer filed in the Michigan Supreme Court challenging the law's constitutionality. Until the courts decide whether the law is valid, abortions continue to be legal in Michigan.


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