Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) blocked the bill on the Senate floor, the first federal clash in the roiling debate over fertility care that an Alabama court sparked earlier this month by granting legal personhood to frozen embryos, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein and Robert King report. Meanwhile, on the Hill: An effort to protect access to in vitro fertilization nationwide was scuttled Wednesday evening. It’s the other kinds of laws, like Alabama’s, that I’m more concerned about,” Amanda Allen, deputy executive director for legal programs at the Lawyering Project, which advocates for abortion rights, said. “The real risk is actually not the abortion bans. Others, like Texas, have tucked in their criminal statutes definitions that specify that personhood begins at conception or rulings that have interpreted the law as saying so. “For us, it’s about making sure that IVF is available but that these embryos aren’t needlessly discarded.”Ī dozen or so states have broad so-called fetal personhood laws that confer rights on fetuses from the moment of fertilization. The Alabama decision kind of came out of left field,” said Billy Valentine, vice president of political affairs at Susan B. “A lot of state legislators right now are scratching their heads - whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, pro-life, pro-choice - and saying, ‘What are our laws on IVF?’ A lot of politicians have spent little or no time thinking about this. That has lawmakers and organizations on both sides of the political spectrum scrambling to understand state statutes - some nearly four decades old - as they seek to protect access to IVF, which is overwhelmingly popular in the U.S. “The concern is that IVF could truly be in the crosshairs. “Even if we read a certain bill way and every lawyer who reads the bill interprets it that same way, it takes just one judge to interpret something differently, or in this case, I guess, a group of judges,” Betsy Campbell, chief engagement officer at RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, said. And fertility organizations fear any of them could be one court ruling away from becoming the next Alabama, which a little over a week ago set off a national firestorm when its Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered people. More than a third of states consider fetuses to be people at some point during pregnancy, either because of legislation or case law. It’s the state laws already on the books that scare them, Megan reports. ‘SCRATCHING THEIR HEADS’ - Fertility groups aren’t worried about a bevy of new bills making changes to the in vitro fertilization process.
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