WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – As Alabama lawmakers rush to get every fertility clinic in the state back up and running, George Washington University Law professor Sonia Suter warns this battle may not be over.
“I would worry about it. There’s more uncertainty than I would want to deal with for a procedure that involves so much,” she said.
Suter says while state lawmakers are pushing a bill to shield clinics from lawsuits, it does not clarify Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling, which says that frozen embryos used for in vitro fertilization are children.
“You would have to have a lawsuit. You’d have to have it come up before the Alabama Supreme Court,” Suter explained. “But I could see in the way some of the justices have written this, a court say, no, I’m sorry, the sanctity of unborn life means all unborn life.”
The White House is urging Congress to pass federal guidelines to clarify the law.
First Lady Dr. Jill Biden said, “Yes, that means protecting IVF.”
The effort to protect IVF effort hit a wall earlier this week.
Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) says she supports IVF, but Democrats’ proposal goes way too far.
“It would legalize gene edited designer babies and let the federal ban on the creation of three parent embryos,” she said as she objected.
Emma Waters with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says this is a battle of morality.
She said that “many researchers have described the fertility industry in the United States as a wild, wild West,” and to protect human life, there should be more, not less, oversight of the fertility industry.
