We don’t know if former Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen were left with embryos after using the advanced reproductive technology known as in vitro fertilization to become parents to their three children, who are now adults.

In November 2022, after the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion, the fiercely anti-abortion Pence told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the couple had struggled with infertility for years and that he would never dream of stopping others from doing so use such technology to have children.

“I fully support fertility treatments, and I think they deserve the protection of the law,” said Pence, who also avidly supports fetal personhood, that is, the idea that every fertilized egg is entitled to full protection under the law.

Well, guess what? You can’t do both.

Last month, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that frozen embryos are human under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, putting a sharp spotlight on the hypocrisy driving much of the anti-abortion fight. Three IVF clinics

in the state

soon announced they would be putting their programs on hold.

A lot of state legislators are scratching their heads right now, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, pro-life or pro-choice, and saying, what are our laws on IVF? Billy Valentine, the vice president of political affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told Politico. For us, it’s about ensuring that IVF is available, but that these embryos are not unnecessarily discarded.

Hoping it goes both ways, the Alabama

L

The legislature rushed to pass a law protecting patients and caregivers from prosecutions and lawsuits related to IVF services.

A similar effort is underway in Congress, albeit with a different motivation. After Roe vs. Wade had been destroyed, the Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Patty Murray of Washington introduced legislation that would provide federal protection.

for

fertility treatments They feared an abortion ban would lead to an attack on IVF, in which couples routinely create more embryos than they can use.

Than

throw them away or donate them for research. The bill would protect doctors and insurance companies from prosecution and give parents the right to determine the fate of their embryos.

Republicans blocked the measure again

load

week, prompting Murray to accuse them of hypocrisy.

It was incredible to see Republicans rush to suddenly support IVF, when many of those same Republicans are literally co-sponsoring legislation that would enshrine the personhood of the fetus, Murray told reporters. You cannot support IVF and fetal personhood laws. They are fundamentally incompatible. You’re not fooling anyone.

Last year,

Judith There

dean of Northern Kentucky University

Samuel P.

Chase College of Law, published a prescient article in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics that speculated about the effect banning abortion would have on practices like IVF, in which embryos are routinely frozen, tested for genetic abnormalities, discarded or selectively aborted in multiple pregnancies after implantation.

Applied to IVF, wrote Daar, who studies the legal and ethical issues arising from advanced reproductive technologies, throwing away embryos could be considered murder, while cryopreservation could amount to a kind of battery on the frozen embryo.

Once a couple has completed the IVF process, she told me Thursday, any decision about what to do with the donation of the remaining embryos to research, their compassionate transfer to another couple and their destruction could trigger the allegation that there was assault, unlawful treatment, wrongful death. . It is up to the state to decide whether to pursue criminal charges.

Pre-implantation genetic testing is a particular dilemma in states where embryos are considered human, she said. Would it ever be in an embryo’s best interest to perform a test, the very purpose of which is to discard embryos that are unhealthy? Would you test someone with the aim of ending their life?

More than 2% of births in the United States each year are the result of advanced technology such as IVF. Last year, Daar said, that was about 100,000 babies. Since 1978, when the first IVF baby was born, the number now stands at well over 8 million. It is estimated that between 1 and 5 million frozen embryos are living in suspended animation in the United States, which, unlike some other countries, does not limit the number of years embryos can be stored.

Although the Alabama Supreme Court did not specifically address a couple’s choice

destroy frozen embryos

his statement has been uncorked

a powerful dilemma that anti-abortion states will face: how can legislation criminalize abortion while at the same time allowing or condoning the destruction of embryo-sized “human beings” conceived through IVF?

This phenomenon is called IVF exceptionalism.

IVF, which is not covered by most insurance plans, is very expensive. A single cycle, which includes ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval, fertilization and implantation, can cost between $15,000 and $30,000, Forbes reported last year. A majority of women go through more than one cycle.

The simple fact, Daar wrote, is that the majority of patients seeking IVF are of higher socioeconomic status and are white; the majority of patients seeking abortions are of lower socio-economic status and are of color.

Indeed.

To put it in the crudest terms, for anti-abortion zealots who support advanced reproductive technologies, “killing babies” in the pursuit of parenthood is perfectly justified, but “killing babies” to avoid parenthood is murder.

Are we at all surprised?

@robinkabcarian