It's been a really rough week for Republicans who hate reproductive rights, and Republican Rep. Michelle Steel of California is no exception. "As someone who struggled to get pregnant, I believe all life is a gift. IVF allowed me, as it has so many...
Can someone explain why this bill prevents IVF? So OK it says that the embryo in the petri dish or whatever is a human. Is the point that therefore other various laws apply to it and so it can’t be implanted? Or is it other parts of the process are now forbidden like the freezing others have mentioned?
During IVF, you don’t prepare a single embryo. You prepare dozens at once.
IVF is used when for whatever reason the natural process fails. This can be due to had sperm, bad eggs, trouble with the path to the womb, hormonal imbalances, and a large number of illnesses that fuck up this delicate process. So IVF has to fight a steep uphill battle, and you want multiple fighters in the ring to increase the odds. Why do it all at once and not over after the other? Extraction of the eggs requires intense, weeks to months of hormonal therapy. The extraction is also a surgical procedure, requiring a surgeon to access the ovaries. This is painful and has health risks, you don’t want to this every week. Less time and less procedures also help reduce costs. IVF is expensive, quickly costing many thousands of dollars. Last but not least, IVF is an intensely stress- and painful time for the couple on a psychological level alone. Every failed attempt weighs heavy, every miscarriage is a huge loss. Those emotions should not be toyed with and it’s clearly ethical to follow the medical process with the highest success chance and least suffering.
Explaining the process: You extract many eggs and fertilize them with sperm at once. Then you wait for them to do their first couple cell divisions, usually until they are a count of 4, 8 or 16 cells, varies by nation and its laws. The more splits, the easier to qualify the health and success chance of the embryo.
Even during this early stage, multiple of the embryos typically fail to divide properly and are then discarded.
Then, the most vital and hopeful embryos are selected and implanted during another surgical procedure directly into the womb. Again, always multiple. This is because some embryos will die during the process, others will not attach. In the end, you only need one embryo to attach and get supplied by the womb, then you’re on track to getting pregnant.
All the other good candidates are frozen, so you have them ready for possible future implantation attempts. It’s common that the attachment process doesn’t work at first try.
Once your pregnancy is carried out (miscarriage is always a big risk up until the end during IVF) and you are certain you don’t want more kids, the rest of the frozen embryos are discarded.
With this new interpretation of the law, doctors and lab techs would be mass murderers.
If the embryos are people, just ask them if they don’t mind being thrown out. If they say nothing, then it’s fine.
Since they’re underage, the mother would have the authority to make medical decisions on their behalf. If she decides that they wouldn’t want to be kept alive by machines like an industrial freezer, surely that’s her choice, right?
I’m not a lawyer but I’d love to see how something like this pans out. It feels like another one of those situations where an idiot makes a sweeping ruling that doesn’t consider the many many ways it affects society.
All makes perfect sense, thanks for explaining!
As a bonus fact: because multiple embryos are implanted at once, IVF has a much higher chance of having multiple embryos take hold at once. So while getting pregnant is hard on the first place, if it works, there’s a higher than usual chance to get twins ( or even more, though much less likely).
This “risk” is clearly communicated in the preparation phase and the potential parents have to ok and accept this for IVF to go ahead at all.
IVF isn’t always successful. Nobody is going to perform it if an expected failure is going to result in a murder charge.
I agree.
Also, more embryos may be created than needed. So after a couple conceives, if those embryos are considered to be people, what can the fertility clinic reasonably do with them that won’t be considered murder?
With IVF, multiple embryos are grown and then analyzed - the best are implanted, the rest are usually either destroyed or (with the donors’ permission) used for research. You literally can’t conduct IVF without destroying some of the embryos.