I’ve written before about Reproductive Freedom, but in light of the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding IVF – In Vitro Fertilization – and in consideration of Women’s History Month, this is a subject that must be revisited. Moreover, our own Congressman, Dr. John Joyce (a dermatologist) is so severely misguided, he co-sponsored the terribly flawed Life Begins at Conception Act in Congress in 2023.1 Mercifully, it failed.
To put myself through college, I worked as a pharmacy technician in a fertility pharmacy. If you’re not familiar with IVF, the basic premise is something like this: partners inject hormones into women who hope to develop follicles into eggs with the possibility of later extracting them, injecting a spermatozoa into each one, then having those fertilized eggs, now embryos, implanted into the woman’s uterus. With more hormonal injections, the hope is that one or more of the implanted embryos will “take” and become a sustained pregnancy that result in a normal delivery.
Depending on the woman’s insurance, as well as her health risk factors, in addition to the success rates of previous implantations, a woman may choose to implant more than one or two embryos. Often, the excess embryos created are kept frozen until a couple decides to implant, donate, or discard this genetic material they created. Month after month, I worked that pharmacy register during the early 90’s, ringing up tens of thousands of dollars of uninsured hormonal injections as infertile couples gambled on such precious hopes.
Over time, insurance companies covered more of these injections and procedures, allowing couples more opportunities at success. Decades after my work at the pharmacy, my husband and I encountered our own fertility challenges and began to explore that same path. Ultimately, we conceived without IVF for each of our children, though at another point we suffered a miscarriage. I write these things, not only to enlighten readers who never learned about IVF, but also to highlight the level of complexity that many couples face, whether they suffer infertility or not. Pregnancy is not only different from one woman to another, but pregnancies may be different from one another for the same woman.
This is all to say that when it comes to IVF, there is much process, many pinned hopes, greater success today, and a flourishing industry. This also means that there are thousands of embryos across the country that are stored frozen, donated, or discarded annually, which is why when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos legally count as children under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, IVF clinics immediately halted their services.2 If embryos were considered equal in the right to life of fully-formed humans, then any discarded embryo would constitute murder. All of a sudden, those families seeking IVF treatment were denied this path to parenthood because Alabama clinic personnel could not risk criminal prosecution for providing the fertility services they routinely did.3
But the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling is beyond ridiculous because if they truly believed that embryos had the rights of fully formed children, then they should have found IVF centers guilty of wrongdoing not only for discards, but for freezing them in the first place. As John Oliver put it so succinctly, “If you freeze an embryo, it’s fine. If you freeze a person, you have some explaining to do.”4
Yet Representative Joyce continues to push this ridiculous and unscientific concept. He is so twisted in this non-medical definition, that this week he highlighted his recent visit to a crisis pregnancy center. It is extremely important to note that crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are generally not licensed healthcare facilities.
“CPCs—particularly those that are not staffed by medical professionals—are not bound by federal privacy laws, such as HIPAA, and therefore are not legally bound to protect their patients’ information or confidentiality. They also lack the regulatory oversight that governs legitimate medical clinics.” – American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
The people working in them are often unlicensed themselves, nor do they have to maintain sanitary conditions. If a vaginal probe of an ultrasound machine that one can buy off of Amazon.com is simply inserted into one woman, then another, then another, with no disinfection in between, who is to hold them accountable?5
No one, actually. That’s the point of avoiding state regulation – there’s no accountability. Congressman Joyce promoted a local CPC just this week.
What CPCs do is collect money from churches then use it to convince vulnerable pregnant people not to have an abortions. Then they turn back to the churches to brag about how many “babies they saved.” They then receive more money. It’s a sick cycle that preys on people who didn’t fully research the CPC. Sometimes crisis pregnancy centers throw in some diapers, baby clothes, and furniture for the pregnant person, but for people who didn’t want to be parents in the first place these materials that babies quickly outgrow do not solve the needs of childcare, or increased insurance costs, or extra strain on a household.
Living, breathing children need new car seats, not used ones whose history no one knows.6
Living, breathing children need food, like so many other American children living with food insecurity.7
And most of all, living, breathing children need people who care very much about them and are equipped to do so, not unprepared birth parents whose agency around reproductive choice was thwarted by the emotional manipulations of “nice” ladies in pink scrubs who said things like, “OOOH, look at your BABY on our [unregulated, possibly inaccurate] ultrasound!!” when that vulnerable person was considering an abortion.8
Crisis pregnancy centers, the Alabama Supreme Court, anti-abortionists, and Congresspeople who push Life at Conception Acts really have one thing in common – to remove the agency of women who seek to make their own healthcare decisions. Don’t let John Joyce and his fellow forced birthers make these discriminatory bills the law of the land. Vote them OUT!
Please vote for me, Beth Farnham, as U.S. House Representative for Pennsylvania’s 13th Congressional District because I will fight for your Reproductive Freedom, your agency, and that of every other American.
Beth Farnham for Congress 