In creating hundreds of thousands of embryos that will never be placed in a uterus, we have entered a situation for which there is no morally just solution.
The Supreme Court of Alabama recently issued a ruling that frozen embryos are considered children under Alabama state law. Therefore, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics may be liable for wrongful death claims or other damages if those embryos are accidentally destroyed. The plaintiffs in the case alleged that a patient at hospital in Mobile, Alabama, walked into the hospital’s fertility clinic through an unsecured doorway and removed several frozen embryos from cryogenic storage. The meddler’s hand was freeze-burned by the containers, which were kept at extremely low temperatures, and the patient dropped them on the floor, killing the embryos.
Justice Jay Mitchell, writing for the 8-to-1 majority, summarized the court’s ruling:
The sole dissenting justice opined, «the main opinion’s holding almost certainly ends the creation of frozen embryos through [IVF] in Alabama.» IVF practitioners and fertility industry lobbyists responded similarly: instead of reassurances that frozen embryos would be carefully guarded and protected from accidental destruction, some—like the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system—paused their IVF services while they assess potential liability. Critics of the ruling scoff at the notion that an embryo would be considered a child, with some dismissing the embryo as merely a «clump of cells,» rather than a whole and genetically distinct human being in his or her earliest stage of development.
Most other state laws consider the embryo to be the «property» of the parents, which hardly resolves the ethical questions (human life as property is the legal definition of slavery) or the legal conundrums. Actress Sofia Vergara and Nick Loeb famously engaged in a seven-year-long legal battle over custody of their frozen embryos following their breakup in 2014.
