Several months after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos must be considered children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, two IVF clinics are now asking the Supreme Court of the United States to intervene and overturn the ruling, claiming that the parents of the embryos had no standing to sue on behalf of their children.
According to The Hill, the two IVF clinics, the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Health, are also claiming that the Alabama court’s decision violated their due process protections because they weren’t given “fair notice” that the court would rule as it did. The clinics say the court’s decision “violated bedrock fair-notice requirements” protected under the 14th Amendment by declaring that embryos are persons, and that destructing them could therefore open the clinics up to civil liability.
The two clinics had previously requested the Alabama Supreme Court issue a stay on its ruling, which the court denied.
Following the Alabama Court’s decision, state lawmakers quickily passed a bill granting civil and criminal immunity to IVF doctors should they damage or destroy embryos — even if those embryos were destroyed without parental consent.
“This law will have catastrophic consequences and withdraws existing legal protections for Alabama’s most vulnerable persons simply because those persons were created through IVF,” said Live Action founder and president Lila Rose following the law’s passage in March. “This law provides dangerous civil and criminal immunity for ‘damage to or the death of an embryo’ in the course of ‘providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.’ That means complete legal permission to destroy, by accident or intention, embryonic children created through IVF — even against the wishes of the parents.”
“We believe the law falls short of addressing the fertilized eggs currently stored across the state and leaves challenges for physicians and fertility clinics trying to help deserving families have children of their own,” Mobile Infirmary Health and the Center for Reproductive Medicine said in a joint statement in March. Those “fertilized eggs” happen to be human beings with their own distinct DNA — no longer a mere egg and sperm.
Though the fertility clinics claim they want to help families, they also want SCOTUS to agree that these families have no rights if their embryonic children are destroyed.
A response to the request is due back by September 4.
