My IVF Journey

And why Republicans can’t claim to both support IVF and the notion of “fetal personhood”

This is my child at 14 weeks, conceived using IVF, now in the womb of a surrogate mother. I shared this happy news on social media over the weekend, and I wanted folks here to know as well. This has been in the works for years, and I’m so excited—and nervous—to become a father! Our due date is August 24.

I had intended to keep my efforts and experiences in IVF and surrogacy private. But the recent decision by the Alabama Supreme Court compelled me to speak out and share my own story.

Because if you listen to Republicans, they sure sound like they want to protect IVF. After that disastrous ruling out of Alabama, they scrambled to publicly reaffirm that they support the procedure. Trump has even urged Republicans in Alabama to preserve IVF legislatively in the state. But it’s all performative.

The GOP is running from this, no doubt, because IVF is wildly popular and used by millions of people, like me, to start our families. But all their grand statements don’t change a key fact: The minute you declare—as the Alabama Supreme Court and 124 Republican co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act did—that embryos are “persons” under the law, you make IVF functionally impossible. Indeed, nothing in the actual Alabama Supreme Court decision banned IVF; it just said you had to treat all embryos as people.

Well, for starters, nobody freezes “people.” That’s how you already know that they are talking out of two sides of their mouths. The moment you open the door to insisting that in the state of Alabama a mass of cells has the same rights as a fully formed baby (and apparently more rights than a grown woman), everything done with those cells carries legal consequences.

That’s why the ruling upends IVF as a viable, accessible option. To understand this, you can look at my own personal example.

My IVF journey

At the outset, I got very lucky with my egg donor. The doctors were able to retrieve nearly 30 eggs from her. I was elated! From these, they successfully created 11 embryos, a really great result. And luckily, all but one of those embryos were considered healthy, leaving 10 that I could try with. Here is what my currently developing embryo looked like before it was thawed and implanted.

And here’s a critical consideration: My IVF team and I wanted as many embryos as possible because it isn’t always easy to achieve a successful pregnancy. 

In my case, with my first surrogate, after a thrilling and joyous start, we experienced a heartbreaking miscarriage at seven weeks. The fetus had failed to correctly develop a heart, and the pregnancy was not viable. 

Fortunately, my surrogate lived in a state that still permits the use of a process known as a D&C to remove tissue from the uterus lining, in this case a fetus that had zero chance of survival. I can’t imagine the nightmare of her having to wait any longer to end a non-viable pregnancy, which might have occurred had she lived just one state over thanks to the Dobbs decision. It really brought home for me the many horrific consequences of that ruling.

Things did not go as planned from there. After we were finally able to try again, many months later, we suffered two back-to-back unsuccessful implantations, meaning after the embryos were implanted, they failed to result in pregnancy. It was devastating on many levels, including ultimately having to change surrogates at the advice of our doctor. After being together on the journey with my first surrogate for over a year, it was hard to admit defeat and say goodbye. But I took some solace in the fact that I could still keep trying with a new surrogate.

Because I still had seven embryos left.

Yet here’s the thing: After I create my family, I will very likely still have many embryos that remain unimplanted. That’s how the math of this works. The cost of storage is very high, so most IVF parents understandably choose to dispose of any unimplanted ones or donate them to science. We can do that because a teeny mass of cells is most certainly not a person. 

But with the Alabama ruling, and the threat of more like it to follow, everything changes in the jurisdictions affected. If intended parents can’t plan to dispose of unimplanted embryos, because under no circumstance would we be allowed to end the life of “persons” who remain frozen, then IVF will stop being a realistic or practical option. 

In my case, I would have only been able to proceed with a single embryo at a time, and each would have had to have been implanted more or less as soon as it was created. That live transfer process would have been much more expensive. And it would also have taken far longer to create my family, with each IVF a separate medical procedure instead of one bulk one.

I further would have been highly incentivized to create and implant two embryos at once, given the not insignificant chance of failure. That would increase the risks to the surrogate and to the fetuses during the pregnancy.

Liability issues

Beyond the question of incredibly more complicated logistics and far higher costs, there’s another factor: liability. If IVF clinics are now potentially on the hook for homicide should anything happen to any frozen embryos in their care, it won’t be worth it to them to stay open. They will shut down. Just like some already have in Alabama.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham announced that its medical school was pausing IVF treatments. The Alabama Center for Reproductive Medicine and Mobile Infirmary Medical Center and Alabama Fertility Specialists followed suit, stating that they were similarly halting IVF treatment in the wake of the state supreme court’s ruling.

Republicans try to act like they haven’t thought through or understood the implications of their policies, but that’s simply not the case. The Senate version of the Life at Conception Act, for example, has a carve out for IVF, but the House version does not. And that’s by design.

If Republicans truly supported IVF, they wouldn’t have blocked Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s Access to Family Building Act, which would guarantee access to IVF. 

“It's been crickets since the Alabama ruling,” Sen. Duckworth said, adding that “not a single Republican has reached out to me on the bill.”

She continued, “I've introduced a bill, multiple times, now multiple Congresses — but frankly, let’s see if they vote for it when we bring it to the floor.”

Sen. Duckworth was unsparing in her criticism of Republican doublespeak. “Let’s make it clear: Republicans will say whatever they need to say to try to cover themselves on this, but they’ve been clear and Donald Trump has been the guy leading this effort to eliminate women’s reproductive rights and reproductive choice.”

Indeed, instead of supporting family planning options, Republicans have introduced legislation to severely curtail it through the Life at Conception Act. One of its co-sponsors is Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA), and her hypocrisy knows few bounds. Following the Alabama decision, she publicly declared her support for IVF, stating she used the process with own family. But she failed to mention that she had earlier deprived other families of that same right by co-sponsoring the Life at Conception Act. Rep. Steel has personally been through the process and knows exactly what it would mean if embryos were granted personhood status. 

The bottom line is that the GOP can’t support IVF and support the idea that an embryo is a “person” entitled to full protection under our laws. Supporting IVF means understanding how it actually works and being comfortable with the idea that intended parents must create more embryos than we ultimately need. And clinics cannot be on the hook for murder should anything happen to them. No clinic could survive with that threat hanging over it.

Neither of those two principles can be truly supported by Republicans so long as their party adheres dogmatically to the “life begins at conception” notion. Politicians who claim to support IVF must repudiate these kinds of fetal personhood laws, or their public backing of IVF means exactly nothing.