Republican-proposed bills intended to protect in vitro fertilization in Alabama cleared their first hurdle in the state Legislature Wednesday, more than a week after a state Supreme Court ruling imperiled the procedure and prompted a national backlash.
Alabama lawmakers have scrambled to come up with a fix that would preserve IVF practices in the state following the ruling, which said that embryos are people. The ruling prompted several IVF clinics in the state to halt their services and gave way to concerns about the broader impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Amid that blowback, Republican legislators in the Alabama House and Senate introduced legislation this week they say would create specific protections that shield patients, doctors and other professionals engaged in IVF services from prosecution and civil suits in the state.
One bill — SB 159 — proposes that “no action, suit, or criminal prosecution shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity providing goods or services related to in vitro fertilization.” It includes language that creates an exception for actions “not arising from or related to IVF services.”
Another bill — SB 160 – would provide “an individual or entity that provides services related to in vitro fertilization” with “criminal and civil immunity to the extent the individual or entity follows commonly accepted practices of providing in vitro fertilization services.”
On Wednesday, the state Senate Health Care committee discussed the bills, giving both a “favorable report,” which means they will advance to other committees for further debate.
The progression amounts to an early and incremental step and doesn’t necessarily mean the bills will ultimately get a full Legislature vote.
Lawmakers in the state House will meet later Wednesday afternoon to discuss another bill — HB 237 — similar to the Senate ones.
During the committee hearings Wednesday, Democratic state Senators expressed concerns about both proposals, saying they failed to address the core question that the state Supreme Court ruling prompted: Should a frozen embryo created via IVF be regarded under law as a child?
“What got us here was the definition of a child. And I noticed that this bill does not address a fertilized egg that exists outside of the uterus,” state Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison, a Democrat, said during the hearing, referring to SB 160. “That’s what got us here.”
“We keep trying to avoid the elephant in the room, which is why we are here in the first place,” she added.
Moments later, state Sen. Tim Melson, the Republican who sponsored SB 160, acknowledged that embryos created via IVF shouldn’t be regarded as children, but said he didn’t want lawmakers to legislate the question of when life begins.
“I think we have experts who say it’s not viable until it’s in the uterus, but we’re not going down that road,” he said.
That, in turn, triggered a brief and tense back-and-forth between the two legislators, with Coleman-Madison saying, “I want to go down the road.”
She argued that until it becomes legally clear in the state whether an embryo created via IVF could be treated as a person under the law, then conservative lawyers and judges would continue to bestow those rights.
“Some people are trying to take their embryos to another state to store them. Is that child trafficking because it’s defined as a child?” Coleman-Madison said. “This just opens up a lot of things that a smart lawyer — and they are out there — is going to take to the max.”
“They’re going to take it to the max unless we redefine this, as far as whether an embryo is a child,” she said. “And if we don’t deal with the elephant in the room that got us to this place, we’re going to be back here.”
The Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling effectively found that embryos created through in vitro fertilization are considered children. The court found that people can be held legally responsible for the destruction of embryos under a state wrongful death law declaring that an unjustified or negligent act leading to a person’s death is a civil offense.
As a result, providers of IVF services and embryo transport could face repercussions if embryos are discarded — a common part of the IVF process, since some embryos can have genetic abnormalities or may no longer be needed.
The ruling — which cited an amendment to the state constitution passed by voters in 2018 that established “the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate” — triggered an outcry of criticism against Republicans and conservatives in Alabama and across the U.S., who have struggled in the years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade to form a coherent message around abortion and reproductive rights.
For those lawmakers who have pushed strict anti-abortion policies, have said that they believe life begins at conception, or that they believe that an embryo or fetus deserves the full rights of a person, the ruling created particularly challenging complications.
In Alabama, that has meant that Republican state lawmakers have faced immense pressure to respond to the ruling with a legislative fix to protect IVF — including calls from former President Donald Trump to fix the issue “quickly.”
Democrats in the GOP-controlled Legislature have also proposed fixes.
House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels proposed a bill last week saying that, under Alabama law, a “human egg or human embryo that exists in any form outside of the uterus shall not, under any circumstances, be considered an unborn child.”
He also filed a proposed constitutional amendment that changed the 2018 one to include a provision that “an extrauterine embryo” — the term used in the state Supreme Court ruling — “is not an unborn life or unborn child.”
Those bills have yet to see any movement.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
