A conundrum!

FACT NO FICTION!

336 Hours by Rachel Cathan

336 Hours by Rachel Cathan documents the honest account of a woman attempting her third IVF treatment and the emotional, funny, and moving experiences she goes through. Imagine placing on top of her experience discovering that you’d be committing a felony if you disposed the unused fertilized embryos. This is the conundrum created by the Supreme Court’s ruling when they overturned Roe v. Wade and left it up to the individual states to decide the fate of abortion rights. People waiting for babies could realistically be impacted by laws passed in their state granting personhood to frozen fertilized embryos. Some states say fertilization starts life; some say 15 weeks. Some do not specifically talk about IVF; others feel personhood starts immediately. No one knows precisely at this point which is making choices risky and very tough for couples choosing IVF. Depending on the state, a lot of these couples could be in legal limbo with tough choices.

Currently, their choices may be fertilizing one embryo at a time, freezing embryos and then implanting all of them and seeing what happens, transferring the frozen embryos to states which allow their existence, or paying for the frozen embryos’ storage in perpetuity all of which will be prohibitively expensive.

I think we are looking at a lot of unintended consequences here.