Court allows two wrongful death suits against fertility clinic to proceed while decision could impact people seeking IVF
In a first-of-its-kind decision, the Alabama supreme court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are “children”, allowing two wrongful death suits against a Mobile fertility clinic to proceed. The decision could have sweeping implications for people seeking in vitro fertilization (IVF) or other assisted reproductive technology treatments and could increase criminalization of expectant people.
In 2021, a patient at Mobile’s Center for Reproductive Medicine wandered into the clinic’s cryogenic nursery and removed several embryos. According to the lawsuit, “the subzero temperatures at which the embryos had been stored freeze-burned the patient’s hand, causing the patient to drop the embryos on the floor, killing them”.
The three couples who lost their frozen embryos sued for wrongful death, but the clinic claimed that Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act did not apply to embryos outside of the womb. Mobile county circuit court judge Jill Parrish Philips agreed with that argument and ruled to dismiss the case, but the state’s supreme court threw it out last week.
Alabama supreme court justice Jay Mitchell wrote that embryos are indeed protected under the state’s existing law: “The central question presented in these consolidated appeals, which involve the death of embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, is whether the act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children – that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed,” he wrote.
