IVF clinic at center of Alabama legal fight pauses procedures

Two more Alabama fertility clinics announced Thursday they would be halting in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments in light of the state Supreme Court’s decision this week that found frozen embryos can be considered children under the law. One of the clinics is the facility being sued in the lawsuit on which the court ruled.

Alabama Fertility Specialists and The Center for Reproductive Medicine both cited the court’s decision in their respective announcements. The Center for Reproductive Medicine is currently being sued by patients whose frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed while being stored by the clinic in the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center, a local hospital.

“Mobile Infirmary, an affiliate of Infirmary Health, announces today that in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures are paused following the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision. Effective February 24, 2024, the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Mobile Infirmary is pausing IVF treatments to prepare embryos for transfer,” the facilities said in a joint statement.

In the lawsuit, the health care facilities had warned that allowing frozen embryos to be considered children under Alabama state law would make IVF treatments more expensive and the storage of embryos more difficult. The court, while acknowledging these concerns, dismissed them as legislative issues and not legal questions for the bench to consider.

Alabama Fertility Specialists in Mountain Brook said in its announcement it felt “so powerless” due to the ruling.

“We have made the impossibly difficult decision to hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists. 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 on its Facebook page.

The clinics’ decisions come after the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system announced earlier this week that it too would be pausing all IVF treatments, saying it was motivated to do so due to concerns that patients and physicians would be “prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments.”

Multiple embryos are often created during IVF cycles, with some patients choosing to transfer more than one to increase the chances of a successful conception. However, embryos often go unused for various reasons.

Patients have several options available to them in these situations, including donating embryos to couples unable to produce viable ones or to scientific research. For patients who don’t wish to donate, they can have the embryos thawed and disposed of as medical waste or have them implanted in the mother’s uterus in what is called “compassionate transfer.”

Compassionate transfer is done during a time when pregnancy is least likely to occur. In these cases, the embryo is naturally disposed of by the woman’s body during her next menstrual cycle.

The ruling from Alabama has been blasted by fertility specialists who argue the decision threatens both the norms of IVF care and scientific research.

“The Alabama ruling has significant implications for those of us who work as clinical embryologists,” the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said in a statement.

“As individuals responsible for the handling and storage of frozen embryos, embryologists will now face uncertainty, ethical dilemmas, and potentially serious legal ramifications surrounding their day-to-day professional practices, which will make it impossible for them to provide the best evidence-based care to the patients who are so desperately seeking to have children,” the group said.