Latest news with #fetalPersonhood
The Independent
01-07-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Expert says Adriana Smith's case goes beyond abortion politics
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old woman from Georgia who had been declared brain-dead in February 2025, spent 16 weeks on life support while doctors worked to keep her body functioning well enough to support her developing fetus. On June 13, 2025, her premature baby, named Chance, was born via cesarean section at 25 weeks. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she suffered multiple blood clots in her brain. Her story gained public attention when her mother criticized doctors' decision to keep her on a ventilator without the family's consent. Smith's mother has said that doctors told the family the decision was made to align with Georgia 's LIFE Act, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and bolsters the legal standing of fetal personhood. A statement released by the hospital also cites Georgia's abortion law. 'I'm not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy,' Smith's mother told a local television station. 'But I'm saying we should have had a choice.' The LIFE Act is one of several state laws that have been passed across the U.S. since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision invalidated constitutional protections for abortion. Although Georgia's attorney general denied that the LIFE Act applied to Smith, there's little doubt that it invites ethical and legal uncertainty when a woman dies while pregnant. Smith's case has swiftly become the focus of a reproductive rights political firestorm characterized by two opposing viewpoints. For some, it reflects demeaning governmental overreach that quashes women's bodily autonomy. For others, it illustrates the righteous sacrifice of motherhood. In my work as a gender and technology studies scholar, I have cataloged and studied postmortem pregnancies like Smith's since 2016. In my view, Smith's story doesn't fit straightforwardly into abortion politics. Instead, it points to the need for a more nuanced ethical approach that does not frame a mother and child as adversaries in a medical, legal or political context. Birth after death For centuries, Catholic dogma and Western legal precedent have mandated immediate cesarean section when a pregnant woman died after quickening, the point when fetal movement becomes discernible. But technological advances now make it possible sometimes for a fetus to continue gestating in place when the mother is brain-dead, or 'dead by neurological criteria'– a widely accepted definition of death that first emerged in the 1950s. The first brain death during pregnancy in which the fetus was delivered after time on life support, more accurately called organ support, occurred in 1981. The process is extraordinarily intensive and invasive because the loss of brain function impedes many physiological processes. Health teams, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, must stabilize the bodies of 'functionally decapitated' pregnant women to buy more time for fetal development. This requires vital organ support, ventilation, nutritional supplements, antibiotics and constant monitoring. Outcomes are highly uncertain. Smith's 112-day stint on organ support ranks third in length for a postmortem pregnancy, with the longest being 123 days. Hers is also the earliest ever gestational age from which the procedure has been attempted. Because time on organ support can vary widely, and because there is no established minimum fetal age considered too early to intervene, a fetus could theoretically be deemed viable at any point in pregnancy. Postmortem pregnancy as gender-based violence Over the past 50 years, critics of postmortem pregnancy have argued that it constitutes gender-based violence and violates bodily integrity in ways that organ donation does not. Some have compared it with Nazi pronatalist policies. Others have attributed the practice to systemic sexism and racism in medicine. Postmortem pregnancy can also compound intimate partner violence by giving brain-dead women's murderers decision-making authority when they are the fetus's next of kin. Fetal personhood laws complicate end-of-life decision-making in ways that many consider violent, too. As I have seen in my own research, when the fetus is considered a legal person, women's wishes may be assumed, debated in court or committee, or set aside entirely, nearly always in favor of the fetus. From the perspective of reproductive rights advocates, postmortem pregnancy is the bottom of a slippery slope down which anti-abortion sentiment has led America. It obliterates women's autonomy, pitting living and dead women against doctors, legislators and sometimes their own families, and weaponizing their own fetuses against them. A medical perspective on rights Viewed through a medical lens, however, postmortem pregnancy is not violent or violating, but an act of repair. Although care teams have responsibilities to both mother and fetus, a pregnant woman's brain death means she cannot be physically harmed and her rights cannot be violated to the same degree as a fetus with the potential for life. Medical practitioners are conditioned to prioritize life over death, motivating a commitment to salvage something from a tragedy and try to partially restore a family. The high-stakes world of emergency medicine makes protecting life reflexive and medical interventions automatic. Once fetal life is detected, as one hospital spokesperson put it in a 1976 news article in The Boston Globe, 'What else could you do?' This response does not necessarily stem from conscious sexism or anti-abortion sentiment, but from reverence for vulnerable patients. If physicians declare a pregnant woman brain-dead, patienthood often automatically transfers to the fetus needing rescue. No matter its age and despite its survival being dependent on machines, just like its mother, the fetus is entirely animate. Who or what counts as a legal person with privileges and protections might be a political or philosophical determination, but life is a matter of biological fact and within the doctors' purview. An ethics of anti-opposition Both of the above perspectives have validity, but neither accounts for postmortem pregnancy's ethical and biological complexity. First, setting mother against fetus, with the rights of one endangering the rights of the other, does not match pregnancy's lived reality of 'two bodies, sutured,' as the cultural scholar Lauren Berlant put it. Even the Supreme Court recognized this entangled duality in their 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade, which established both constitutional protections for abortion and a governmental obligation to protect fetal life. Whether a fetus is considered a legal person or not, they wrote, pregnant women and fetuses 'cannot be isolated in their privacy' – meaning that reproductive rights issues must strike a balance, however tenuous, between maternal and fetal interests. To declare postmortem pregnancy unequivocally violent or a loss of the 'right to choose' fails to recognize the complexity of choice in a highly politicized medical landscape. Second, maternal-fetal competition muddles the right course of action. In the U.S., competent patients are not compelled to engage in medical care they would rather avoid, even if it kills them, or to stay on life support to preserve organs for donation. But when a fetus is treated as an independent patient, exceptions could be made to those medical standards if the fetus's interests override the mother's. For example, pregnancy disrupts standard determination of death. To protect the fetus, care teams increasingly skip a necessary diagnostic for brain death called apnea testing, which involves momentarily removing the ventilator to test the respiratory centers of the brain stem. In these cases, maternal brain death cannot be confirmed until after delivery. Multiple instances of vaginal deliveries after brain death also remain unexplained, given that the brain coordinates mechanisms of vaginal labor. All in all, it's not always clear women in these cases are entirely dead. Ultimately, women like Adriana Smith and their fetuses are inseparable and persist in a technologically defined state of in-betweenness. I'd argue that postmortem pregnancies, therefore, need new bioethical standards that center women's beliefs about their bodies and a dignified death. This might involve recognizing pregnancy's unique ambiguities in advance directives, questioning default treatment pathways that may require harm to be done to one in order to save another, or considering multiple definitions of clinical and legal death. In my view, it is possible to adapt our ethical standards in a way that honors all beings in these exceptional circumstances, without privileging either 'choice' or 'life,' mother or fetus.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Keeping brain-dead pregnant women on life support raises ethical issues that go beyond abortion politics
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old woman from Georgia who had been declared brain-dead in February 2025, spent 16 weeks on life support while doctors worked to keep her body functioning well enough to support her developing fetus. On June 13, 2025, her premature baby, named Chance, was born via cesarean section at 25 weeks. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she suffered multiple blood clots in her brain. Her story gained public attention when her mother criticized doctors' decision to keep her on a ventilator without the family's consent. Smith's mother has said that doctors told the family the decision was made to align with Georgia's LIFE Act, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and bolsters the legal standing of fetal personhood. A statement released by the hospital also cites Georgia's abortion law. 'I'm not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy,' Smith's mother told a local television station. 'But I'm saying we should have had a choice.' The LIFE Act is one of several state laws that have passed across the U.S. since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision invalidated constitutional protections for abortion. Although Georgia's attorney general denied that the LIFE Act applied to Smith, there's little doubt that it invites ethical and legal uncertainty when a woman dies while pregnant. Smith's case has swiftly become the focus of a reproductive rights political firestorm characterized by two opposing viewpoints. For some, it reflects demeaning governmental overreach that quashes women's bodily autonomy. For others it illustrates the righteous sacrifice of motherhood. In my work as a gender and technology studies scholar, I have cataloged and studied postmortem pregnancies like Smith's since 2016. In my view, Smith's story doesn't fit straightforwardly into abortion politics. Instead, it points to the need for a more nuanced ethical approach that does not frame a mother and child as adversaries in a medical, legal or political context. For centuries, Catholic dogma and Western legal precedent have mandated immediate cesarean section when a pregnant woman died after quickening, the point when fetal movement becomes discernible. But technological advances now make it possible sometimes for a fetus to continue gestating in place when the mother is brain-dead, or 'dead by neurological criteria'– a widely accepted definition of death that first emerged in the 1950s. The first brain death during pregnancy in which the fetus was delivered after time on life support, more accurately called organ support, occurred in 1981. The process is extraordinarily intensive and invasive, because the loss of brain function impedes many physiological processes. Health teams, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, must stabilize the bodies of 'functionally decapitated' pregnant women to buy more time for fetal development. This requires vital organ support, ventilation, nutritional supplements, antibiotics and constant monitoring. Outcomes are highly uncertain. Smith's 112-day stint on organ support ranks third in length for a postmortem pregnancy, with the longest being 123 days. Hers is also the earliest ever gestational age from which the procedure has been attempted. Because time on organ support can vary widely, and because there is no established minimum fetal age considered too early to intervene, a fetus could theoretically be deemed viable at any point in pregnancy. Over the past 50 years, critics of postmortem pregnancy have argued that it constitutes gender-based violence and violates bodily integrity in ways that organ donation does not. Some have compared it with Nazi pronatalist policies. Others have attributed the practice to systemic sexism and racism in medicine. Postmortem pregnancy can also compound intimate partner violence by giving brain-dead women's murderers decision-making authority when they are the fetus's next of kin. Fetal personhood laws complicate end-of-life decision-making in ways that many consider violent too. As I have seen in my own research, when the fetus is considered a legal person, women's wishes may be assumed, debated in court or committee, or set aside entirely, nearly always in favor of the fetus. From the perspective of reproductive rights advocates, postmortem pregnancy is the bottom of a slippery slope down which anti-abortion sentiment has led America. It obliterates women's autonomy, pitting living and dead women against doctors, legislators and sometimes their own families, and weaponizing their own fetuses against them. Viewed through a medical lens, however, postmortem pregnancy is not violent or violating, but an act of repair. Although care teams have responsibilities to both mother and fetus, a pregnant woman's brain death means she cannot be physically harmed and her rights cannot be violated to the same degree as a fetus with the potential for life. Medical practitioners are conditioned to prioritize life over death, motivating a commitment to salvage something from a tragedy and try to partially restore a family. The high-stakes world of emergency medicine makes protecting life reflexive and medical interventions automatic. Once fetal life is detected, as one hospital spokesperson put it in a 1976 news article in The Boston Globe, 'What else could you do?' This response does not necessarily stem from conscious sexism or anti-abortion sentiment, but from reverence for vulnerable patients. If physicians declare a pregnant woman brain-dead, patienthood often automatically transfers to the fetus needing rescue. No matter its age and despite its survival being dependent on machines, just like its mother, the fetus is entirely animate. Who or what counts as a legal person with privileges and protections might be a political or philosophical determination, but life is a matter of biological fact and within the doctors' purview. Both of the above perspectives have validity, but neither accounts for postmortem pregnancy's ethical and biological complexity. First, setting mother against fetus, with the rights of one endangering the rights of the other, does not match pregnancy's lived reality of 'two bodies, sutured,' as the cultural scholar Lauren Berlant put it. Even the Supreme Court recognized this entangled duality in their 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade, which established both constitutional protections for abortion and a governmental obligation to protect fetal life. Whether a fetus is considered a legal person or not, they wrote, pregnant women and fetuses 'cannot be isolated in their privacy' – meaning that reproductive rights issues must strike a balance, however tenuous, between maternal and fetal interests. To declare postmortem pregnancy unequivocally violent or a loss of the 'right to choose' fails to recognize the complexity of choice in a highly politicized medical landscape. Second, maternal-fetal competition muddles the right course of action. In the U.S., competent patients are not compelled to engage in medical care they would rather avoid, even if it kills them, or to stay on life support to preserve organs for donation. But when a fetus is treated as an independent patient, exceptions could be made to those medical standards if the fetus's interests override the mother's. For example, pregnancy disrupts standard determination of death. To protect the fetus, care teams increasingly skip a necessary diagnostic for brain death called apnea testing, which involves momentarily removing the ventilator to test the respiratory centers of the brain stem. In these cases, maternal brain death cannot be confirmed until after delivery. Multiple instances of vaginal deliveries after brain death also remain unexplained, given that the brain coordinates mechanisms of vaginal labor. All in all, it's not always clear women in these cases are entirely dead. Ultimately, women like Adriana Smith and their fetuses are inseparable and persist in a technologically defined state of in-betweenness. I'd argue that postmortem pregnancies, therefore, need new bioethical standards that center women's beliefs about their bodies and a dignified death. This might involve recognizing pregnancy's unique ambiguities in advance directives, questioning default treatment pathways that may require harm be done to one in order to save another, or considering multiple definitions of clinical and legal death. In my view, it is possible to adapt our ethical standards in a way that honors all beings in these exceptional circumstances, without privileging either 'choice' or 'life,' mother or fetus. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Lindsey Breitwieser, Hollins University Read more: Fetal personhood rulings could nullify a pregnant patient's wishes for end-of-life care American womanhood is not what it used to be − understanding the backlash to Dobbs v. Jackson 'A revolutionary ruling – and not just for abortion': A Supreme Court scholar explains the impact of Dobbs This research was supported by a grant from The Institute for Citizens and Scholars.
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Baby of brain-dead Georgia woman on life support delivered via C-section
A brain-dead Georgia woman who was kept on life support to continue her pregnancy had her baby late last week, according to the woman's mother. The Georgia woman, Adriana Smith, gave birth prematurely via emergency cesarean section on 13 June, Smith's mother, April Newkirk, told the local news station 11Alive, which first reported Smith's story. The baby, named Chance, is in the neonatal intensive care unit and weighs 1lb 13oz, 11Alive reported late on Monday night. 'He's expected to be OK,' Newkirk said. 'He's just fighting. We just want prayers for him. Just keep praying for him. He's here now.' Smith is set to be taken off of life support on Tuesday, Newkirk added. Smith went to a hospital in February with what she thought was an intense headache, Newkirk told 11Alive earlier this year. The hospital discharged Smith after providing her with medication, but she was rushed back to the hospital the following day after she woke up gasping for air. Diagnosed with blood clots in her brain, Smith was declared brain dead within hours. Smith's case sparked nationwide outrage after her family said doctors informed them that Georgia's six-week abortion ban required Smith be kept on life support to preserve her pregnancy. Georgia's ban contains provisions that strengthen the concept of 'fetal personhood', a legal doctrine that holds that embryos and fetuses should be entitled to full legal rights and protections. Reproductive justice advocates have long warned that this doctrine can lead the rights of the fetus to be prioritized above those of the person carrying it. 'We didn't have a choice or a say about it,' Newkirk said before Chance's birth. 'We want the baby. That's a part of my daughter. But the decision should have been left to us – not the state.' Newkirk said that doctors had informed her they had no choice but to keep Smith on life support, but the hospital has declined to comment on Smith's case, citing privacy rules. In a statement to the Associated Press, the hospital said it 'uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia's abortion laws and all other applicable laws. Our top priorities continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients we serve.' However, the office of Georgia's attorney general, Chris Carr, released a statement saying that Georgia's ban does not require medical professionals to keep women alive on life support after being declared brain dead. 'Removing life support is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy,' Carr's spokesperson, Kara Murray, said in the statement. Newkirk told 11Alive that, if she could speak to Smith again, she would tell her she was a good daughter. 'I'm her mother,' Newkirk said. 'I shouldn't be burying my daughter. My daughter should be burying me.'
CNN
25-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Trump wants a ‘baby boom,' but an ultra-conservative agenda may hurt IVF access
The recent attack on a California fertility clinic has placed in vitro fertilization back into the national spotlight, but experts in the field say that a conservative focus on natural conception is an even bigger threat to IVF access. The car explosion outside the Palm Springs clinic last weekend injured four people and killed the attacker. Authorities are looking into the suspect, including potential links to anti-natalism, the concept that procreation itself is unethical. Those kinds of fringe ideas don't pose a real political threat to IVF access, reproductive health experts say. Still, the Palm Springs incident is contributing to an increasing unease providers and families are feeling at IVF clinics around the country. While around 2% of babies born in the US are conceived through IVF, some religious groups who view embryos as people oppose the treatment because of the storage and discarding of embryos. And providers are warning anti-abortion policies that seek to give embryos and fetuses the same legal rights as people, known as fetal personhood, also pose a threat to IVF access. After trending downward for decades, the US fertility rate has been hovering near a record low. President Donald Trump and key figures in and around the administration want to change that with a 'baby boom' and are considering incentives like a $5,000 'baby bonus' for new parents. Trump also issued an executive order seeking recommendations to protect IVF access and reduce costs. The White House has said Trump is now reviewing those recommendations. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment. While the administration has been seeking counsel from some providers and experts, one of the nation's most prominent IVF medical and advocacy groups, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told CNN it has been notably excluded from the conversation. The organization made multiple attempts to reach members of the administration and received no response, Sean Tipton, the group's chief advocacy and policy officer, said. Tipton's organization has been sounding the alarm about misleading terms like 'restorative reproductive medicine,' which it says is being used to promote ideas that could eventually hinder access to IVF treatment. The term has gained traction among the Make American Healthy Again movement and conservative groups who emphasize 'natural solutions,' like nutrition changes and cycle tracking, rather than treatment like IVF for infertility. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that authored Project 2025, has promoted the idea, while framing IVF as a treatment that ignores underlying health problems. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine insists restorative reproductive medicine is 'not a new solution or a distinct specialty. It emphasizes treatment of underlying infertility causes, which fertility doctors already do for every patient, and may not address all fertility challenges, such as male factor infertility or blocked fallopian tubes.' There's a lot of misleading medical information on the internet, but not all of it reaches the highest levels of government and policymaking. 'You have to address it, because the political organizations that have promulgated (restorative reproductive medicine) have the ear of many Republicans, including people in the White House,' Tipton said. 'They want to confine people to medical technology that was frozen in the 1970s, and we think people ought to have access to good, cutting edge 21st century care.' Sean Tipton, ASRM chief advocacy and policy officer The push toward natural conception also notably excludes LGBTQ needs. Kerrie King, a 29-year-old who runs a family farm in Mississippi, said she and her wife have been trying to have a child through IVF for over two years. After plenty of searching, they were able to find an LGBTQ friendly fertility clinic two hours from their small town. King and her wife have watched the ways in which the Trump administration has come after the rights of trans and other LGBTQ Americans, and they fear for what that could mean for their own family. 'We hope to continue treatment, but with the executive order up in the air at the moment, we have kind of come to a standstill because of Trump's presidency and how he might restrict access to fertility treatment for LGBT Americans,' King told CNN. Toeing the line between public support for IVF and a conservative turn against it may prove difficult for the president, who once called himself the 'father of IVF.' Last year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are considered human beings and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death, leading fertility clinics throughout the state to pause IVF treatments. Chaos ensued for families who faced losing their shot at a baby, along with the steep amounts of money they invested in fertility treatments. Families, providers and advocates rallied at the state Capitol, while Alabama lawmakers scrambled to remedy the decision. Soon after, the governor signed a bill into law aimed at protecting IVF patients and providers from legal liability. Fertility clinics reopened their doors the next day, and the swift backlash against the court's decision was framed as a win for proponents of IVF. But the issue of fetal personhood at the heart of the Alabama court's decision isn't going away, says University of California, Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler, and the public backlash has not deterred other states from wading into the debate. While the Supreme Court declined to take up a fetal personhood case in 2022, Kansas recently passed a law requiring child support payments cover embryos and fetuses. And Florida lawmakers are advancing a bill allowing parents to seek civil damages for the wrongful death of an embryo or fetus. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant body, also passed a resolution last year asserting embryos are human beings and urged its members to weigh the 'ethical implications' of IVF. Experts say these policies advance fetal personhood. The goal is to end abortion rights nationwide – but it could also mean devastating consequences for IVF treatment, the way so many families in Alabama experienced firsthand last year. In fact, Ziegler says the most prominent threat to abortion rights and IVF access are one and the same. 'Anti-abortion activists who are the most extreme have also started protesting outside of IVF clinics the way they protest outside of abortion clinics,' Ziegler said. While many are anxiously awaiting word from the White House on those IVF policy recommendations, Ziegler said she's watching the courts. 'It's more likely that Trump would nominate judges who believe in a legal theory of fetal personhood, and those judges could reach a ruling with really negative impacts on IVF,' she said. 'And he wouldn't have his fingerprints on it.' 'To some degree, we've seen this movie before,' she added. 'The most significant changes with respect to abortion in the first Trump administration were not policies that Donald Trump signed into law or executive orders. They were from courts.'
CNN
25-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Trump wants a ‘baby boom,' but an ultra-conservative agenda may hurt IVF access
The recent attack on a California fertility clinic has placed in vitro fertilization back into the national spotlight, but experts in the field say that a conservative focus on natural conception is an even bigger threat to IVF access. The car explosion outside the Palm Springs clinic last weekend injured four people and killed the attacker. Authorities are looking into the suspect, including potential links to anti-natalism, the concept that procreation itself is unethical. Those kinds of fringe ideas don't pose a real political threat to IVF access, reproductive health experts say. Still, the Palm Springs incident is contributing to an increasing unease providers and families are feeling at IVF clinics around the country. While around 2% of babies born in the US are conceived through IVF, some religious groups who view embryos as people oppose the treatment because of the storage and discarding of embryos. And providers are warning anti-abortion policies that seek to give embryos and fetuses the same legal rights as people, known as fetal personhood, also pose a threat to IVF access. After trending downward for decades, the US fertility rate has been hovering near a record low. President Donald Trump and key figures in and around the administration want to change that with a 'baby boom' and are considering incentives like a $5,000 'baby bonus' for new parents. Trump also issued an executive order seeking recommendations to protect IVF access and reduce costs. The White House has said Trump is now reviewing those recommendations. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment. While the administration has been seeking counsel from some providers and experts, one of the nation's most prominent IVF medical and advocacy groups, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told CNN it has been notably excluded from the conversation. The organization made multiple attempts to reach members of the administration and received no response, Sean Tipton, the group's chief advocacy and policy officer, said. Tipton's organization has been sounding the alarm about misleading terms like 'restorative reproductive medicine,' which it says is being used to promote ideas that could eventually hinder access to IVF treatment. The term has gained traction among the Make American Healthy Again movement and conservative groups who emphasize 'natural solutions,' like nutrition changes and cycle tracking, rather than treatment like IVF for infertility. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that authored Project 2025, has promoted the idea, while framing IVF as a treatment that ignores underlying health problems. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine insists restorative reproductive medicine is 'not a new solution or a distinct specialty. It emphasizes treatment of underlying infertility causes, which fertility doctors already do for every patient, and may not address all fertility challenges, such as male factor infertility or blocked fallopian tubes.' There's a lot of misleading medical information on the internet, but not all of it reaches the highest levels of government and policymaking. 'You have to address it, because the political organizations that have promulgated (restorative reproductive medicine) have the ear of many Republicans, including people in the White House,' Tipton said. 'They want to confine people to medical technology that was frozen in the 1970s, and we think people ought to have access to good, cutting edge 21st century care.' Sean Tipton, ASRM chief advocacy and policy officer The push toward natural conception also notably excludes LGBTQ needs. Kerrie King, a 29-year-old who runs a family farm in Mississippi, said she and her wife have been trying to have a child through IVF for over two years. After plenty of searching, they were able to find an LGBTQ friendly fertility clinic two hours from their small town. King and her wife have watched the ways in which the Trump administration has come after the rights of trans and other LGBTQ Americans, and they fear for what that could mean for their own family. 'We hope to continue treatment, but with the executive order up in the air at the moment, we have kind of come to a standstill because of Trump's presidency and how he might restrict access to fertility treatment for LGBT Americans,' King told CNN. Toeing the line between public support for IVF and a conservative turn against it may prove difficult for the president, who once called himself the 'father of IVF.' Last year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are considered human beings and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death, leading fertility clinics throughout the state to pause IVF treatments. Chaos ensued for families who faced losing their shot at a baby, along with the steep amounts of money they invested in fertility treatments. Families, providers and advocates rallied at the state Capitol, while Alabama lawmakers scrambled to remedy the decision. Soon after, the governor signed a bill into law aimed at protecting IVF patients and providers from legal liability. Fertility clinics reopened their doors the next day, and the swift backlash against the court's decision was framed as a win for proponents of IVF. But the issue of fetal personhood at the heart of the Alabama court's decision isn't going away, says University of California, Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler, and the public backlash has not deterred other states from wading into the debate. While the Supreme Court declined to take up a fetal personhood case in 2022, Kansas recently passed a law requiring child support payments cover embryos and fetuses. And Florida lawmakers are advancing a bill allowing parents to seek civil damages for the wrongful death of an embryo or fetus. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant body, also passed a resolution last year asserting embryos are human beings and urged its members to weigh the 'ethical implications' of IVF. Experts say these policies advance fetal personhood. The goal is to end abortion rights nationwide – but it could also mean devastating consequences for IVF treatment, the way so many families in Alabama experienced firsthand last year. In fact, Ziegler says the most prominent threat to abortion rights and IVF access are one and the same. 'Anti-abortion activists who are the most extreme have also started protesting outside of IVF clinics the way they protest outside of abortion clinics,' Ziegler said. While many are anxiously awaiting word from the White House on those IVF policy recommendations, Ziegler said she's watching the courts. 'It's more likely that Trump would nominate judges who believe in a legal theory of fetal personhood, and those judges could reach a ruling with really negative impacts on IVF,' she said. 'And he wouldn't have his fingerprints on it.' 'To some degree, we've seen this movie before,' she added. 'The most significant changes with respect to abortion in the first Trump administration were not policies that Donald Trump signed into law or executive orders. They were from courts.'
