An anonymous reader cites a report from Ars Technica. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are “children” with full moral rights and that those who destroy them can be held liable in wrongful death lawsuits. The first-of-its-kind ruling casts doubt on the future use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART), including in vitro fertilization, for patients in Alabama and beyond. This technology allows people who want to have a child but are having difficulty conceiving to create embryos in a clinical setting, which may or may not be implanted in the uterus.
In one incident in Alabama, a hospital patient walked through an unlocked door, removed a cryopreserved embryo from a sub-zero storage room, and then dropped the embryo during ice burn, killing it. The affected IVF patients filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the IVF clinic under the state's Wrongful Death of Minors Act. The case was initially dismissed by a lower court, which ruled that the fetus did not meet the definition of a child. However, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that “this applies without limitation to all children, born and unborn.” Chief Justice Tom Parker cited his own religious beliefs in a concurring opinion, citing the Bible to support his position.
“Human life cannot be unjustly destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who considers the destruction of his image an affront to himself,” Parker wrote. “Every human being is born in the image of God, and his life cannot be destroyed without diminishing the glory of God.” It was estimated that many of the babies were kept frozen, and that a large proportion of them were likely to never give birth. The outcome of this ruling “could mean that embryos destroyed or discarded during or after the IVF process could be subject to wrongful death lawsuits,” Als noted. [According to national ART data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of egg retrievals that fail to result in a live birth ranges from 46 percent to 91 percent, depending on the patient’s age. Meanwhile, the percentage of fertilized egg or embryo transfers that fail to result in a live birth range from 51 percent to 76 percent, depending on age.]
“This ruling imposes potentially paralyzing responsibilities on ART clinics and the patients who use them. Physicians are forced to create additional embryos one at a time to avoid the liability that comes with creating additional embryos. They may choose to only try to create embryos by themselves, or they may refuse to offer IVF altogether to avoid liability if the embryos are created.'' The financially draining and emotionally exhausting process of IVF could become even worse, making the technology completely out of reach for those who want to take advantage of it, and potentially putting clinics out of business. ”