Patients worried IVF treatments could become illegal under abortion bans, doctors say

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, hundreds of frantic phone calls have poured into fertility centers across the nation from patients worried not about abortion access but about their frozen embryos.

Patients are contacting doctors to discuss the legal status of fertilized embryos and decide whether to move them to states with looser abortion restrictions, said Jennifer Hirshfeld-Cytron, vice president and physician at Fertility Centers of Illinois.

"There's so much unknown that it creates a great sense of uncertainty," she said.

The growing concerns come as some abortion laws and bills moving through legislatures, including in Kansas and Wyoming, threaten to jeopardize access to in vitro fertilization, a type of assisted reproductive technology.

Bills defining life as beginning at fertilization or that give embryos legal rights may limit people's control over how their own embryos are used, said Seema Mohapatra, a health law professor at SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas.

This is "more of a future concern," she said, though "unfortunately, states are moving fast, so there is reason to be worried."

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IVF patients raise concerns nationwide

At Pacific Northwest Fertility in Seattle, reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Lora Shahine said her office also got a wave of phone calls from fertility patients wanting to move embryos there. She said there is an increased cost, complexity and risk of damage to embryos associated with moving them because of the possible threat to IVF access.

"When politicians are making these laws, they don't understand the long-term impact they're having on all reproductive health care, including IVF," said Shahine, a founding member of Doctors for Fertility, a national advocacy group supporting IVF and reproductive care access. "It's a much bigger issue than people realize."

Amid "growing uncertainty about legal protections" for IVF, TMRW Life Sciences, a New York-based technology company that stores frozen eggs and embryos, is getting requests to move eggs and embryos to New York, said Lindsay Beck, the company's chief impact officer.

"It's incredibly demoralizing for physicians and patients," Hirshfeld-Cytron said. "It creates an incredible sense of despair. And for fertility patients, this is already such a stressful, costly process."

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What is IVF and why is it important?

IVF is a common process by which people get pregnant and is responsible for about 84,000 babies a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, at least 600,000 frozen embryos were in storage nationwide, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The process is often used by couples having trouble conceiving, LGBTQ couples and people trying to prevent passing on terminal genetic illness or high risks of cancer to children, Hirshfeld-Cytron said.

IVF can easily cost $20,000 each try.

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Abortion laws may threaten IVF access

A growing number of bills in state legislatures define life as beginning at fertilization or give embryos legal rights through "personhood bills," Mohapatra said.

Most recently, a Kansas bill that criminalizes "unlawful destruction of a fertilized embryo" advanced to the state's Senate this month. A Wyoming bill introduced last month and moved to a legislative committee Wednesday would assert that life begins at conception.

Many of these abortion bans and proposals don't include exceptions for IVF, raising concerns over whether they could limit parts of the IVF process, including potentially removing embryos that fail to implant in the uterus or disposing of unused embryos left over after the procedure. This may make IVF less effective, more expensive and less accessible, Mohapatra said.

"The people making these potential laws don't understand the science or the biology, and they don't have the sophistication of scientific knowledge to even really answer our questions," Hirshfeld-Cytron said. "That's a scary place to be, to have politicians with a high school level of science describing to us how we should restrict medical care."

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What IVF patients can do

Mohapatra said that if she had embryos "in a state that does not explicitly protect abortion rights," she would move them. Doing so does come with added cost and a small risk that something could happen to the embryos during transit, Mohapatra said.

"IVF costs a lot of money," she said. "It's very emotionally and physically taxing. And the fact that someone else could have control over something so personal is really concerning."

Shahine recommended patients stay in touch with their clinics and doctors. She said patients also can stay up to date through the organizations Doctors for Fertility, Resolve and American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Meanwhile, a group of Democratic senators introduced the Right to Build Families Act last year in an attempt to legally protect the right to use IVF. In December, the bill was referred to a committee on health, education, labor on pensions.

Contributing: Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY

Contact Christine Fernando at cfernando@usatoday.com or follow her on Twitter at @christinetfern.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: IVF treatments could become illegal under abortion bans, doctors warn