When Brittany Stuart and her husband weren’t having success trying to conceive, they started to explore their options. From adoption to in vitro fertilization (IVF), they decided to embark on the process of the latter in the state of Alabama where they were living at the time.
Stuart describes herself as one of the “lucky” ones, even though the process of IVF is often long, emotionally and physically taxing, and expensive. It begins with ovarian stimulation, where a woman injects herself with hormones for weeks, all while attending various appointments for ultrasounds and bloodwork. Then, she has to go through the egg retrieval procedure. From there, each egg is fertilized by injecting a sperm into the egg, or mixing it with the egg in a petri dish. This fertilized egg is then transferred back to the uterus with the hope of creating a viable pregnancy.
It is common for multiple eggs to be transferred and fertilized because not all transferred embryos turn into viable pregnancies, just like how in a natural conception there’s never a guarantee that the fertilized egg will implant and turn into a fetus weeks later. First-time success rates for IVF often fall between 25 to 30 percent for most IVF patients. In that context, Stuart was lucky. Her first transfer succeeded. She became pregnant, and gave birth to her daughter in 2019.
Since then, she’s moved to Virginia. But she left two fertilized eggs in storage in Alabama to keep the option of having another child in the future. In 2022, she and her husband decided to give IVF a try again. This time the preparation process looked a bit differently. It included booking flights and hotels to go to Alabama for the procedure. Sadly, the transfer didn’t stick. Today, the 39-year-old has her last embryo in Alabama, and now she’s not even sure if and how she’ll be able to go through the process again. Instead, she’s fraught with questions since the Alabama Supreme Court said that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children.”
“Are they saying that I murdered a child?” Stuart in phone call with Salon, referring to how the second embryo transfer was unsuccessful. “My kid is a tax deduction. Is the embryo?”
“Are they saying that I murdered a child? My kid is a tax deduction. Is the embryo?”
IVF patients usually have a few options for their fertilized eggs that haven’t been transferred: to discard them, donate them to research, donate them to another couple, or keep them for a future pregnancy. When it comes to the IVF process, Stuart said, so much is out of your control. There is never guarantee that all the effort will result in a live infant.
“And one of the few things I could control, I thought, was what happens to those embryos,” she said. “I didn’t have any plans to transfer that last embryo tomorrow, but it’s being told that you can’t do something that’s just hard to swallow.”
The clinic she’s a patient at has currently paused transferring frozen embryos.
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The Alabama Supreme Court ruling came from a pair of wrongful death cases brought by couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed in an accident at a fertility clinic. The majority opinion said that an 1872 statute allowing parents to sue for the wrongful death of a minor applies to “unborn children” — and that there is no exception for “extrauterine children,” such as frozen embryos. In Chief Justice Tom Parker’s concurring statement, he cited the Book of Genesis. It’s the first time Alabama applied legal personhood rights to an embryo outside of a pregnant person’s uterus. But the state has a history of t
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Publish date : 2024-02-24 16:47:43
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