First Abortion, now IVF
Women make up about 50.8 percent of the USA population. This is an important number to remember as restrictive reproductive legislation throughout the USA is trying to deny access of more than half of the population to basic medical care.
Women’s reproductive care is health care specific to women’s physiology and to their unique and blessed capacity to bring humans into the world.
It spans a woman’s life from her early to her late years. It includes helping women avoid pregnancies (family planning and contraception), terminating them (abortion, miscarriage and palliative care), delivering babies (maternity care) to helping them conceive when they can’t on their own (assisted reproductive technology-ART). It encompasses pediatric, adolescent and mature women services. It includes preventive measures such as breast cancer screening to treatment for disease states such as sexually transmitted infections or hysterectomy for fibroids or surgery for ovarian cancer – just to name a few.
The doctors (Ob-Gyns), nurses, reproductive facilities and maternity hospitals, all contribute to making this care possible. Ob-Gyn clinicians cannot be trained without patients, teachers or clinical facilities.
When laws remove women’s access to medical care they don’t just stop abortion or IVF. They diminish all women’s care. They also decrease clinician availability! When doctors are not allowed to treat women with a reproductive injury, they do not want to practice where they may be persecuted!
The consequences of losing trained clinicians will affect the safety and quality of life of all women and their families – in fact it will destroy the very fiber of our lives. Imagine needing to deliver your baby but your maternity hospital has closed down because there are no Ob-Gyns as in Idaho. Read more
In vitro fertilization (IVF) – which represents to most effective method of helping women conceive- has been dealt a blow in the state of Alabama due to its recent ruling.
#IVF
In Alabama, the recent Supreme Court ruling said that embryos are extra-uterine humans and as a result it created an impossible situation for in vitro fertilization programs and their staff making them unable to continue to practice in the state. This is because the processes of helping women become pregnant and having a healthy baby requires the handling of embryos, the termination of the ones unlikely to survive and the reduction of dangerous multi-fetal pregnancies such as twins or triplets. Doctors offering fertility care may be persecuted and jailed under this law for simply providing scientifically based treatments which are the current standard of medical care.
As a result, moms and families in Alabama who desperately need treatment for fertility troubles can no longer get it. Women in Alabama who have an unwanted pregnancy cannot get an abortion. Women who come hemorrhaging from an impending miscarriage cannot have life saving surgery.
There is fear that this law will spread past Alabama to other states with abortion bans and may further diminish women’s reproductive options.
The potential damage from this law was so alarming that the leading authority in obstetrics and gynecology (ACOG) has issued a statement regarding IVF in Alabama. Read more
“This dangerous decision sets an incredibly concerning precedent for IVF access across the United States. We have seen state legislatures replicate one another’s reproductive health care policies in an ill-advised attempt to compete for the most restrictive and harmful laws. The outcome of this case will certainly affect access to fertility treatment across the country as more and more state legislatures advance policies that are based on an ideological and unscientific definition of personhood. It reflects a dangerous insertion of individual ideological beliefs into policy making about what medical care is available to all of us.”
The Alabama Supreme Court IVF decision created national uproar and protests from previous and current IVF patients. In Alabama, at least 3 fertility clinics closed leaving their staff and patients fearing for their futures. Realizing the negative voting consequences this could potentially have for the Republican Party, Republican leaders in the US senate and the House of Representatives reacted by voicing support for the IVF treatments.
As a result, the Alabama House of Representatives and state Senate both passed bills last week stating that IVF providers have civil and criminal immunity from prosecution and legal action related to the services they provide. Alabama Legislature passes protections for IVF providers / The Hill
Chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine though argued the following: “We are pleased that the members of the Alabama General Assembly have responded to that advocacy and have repeatedly stated their interest in providing a legislative solution. However, the legislation we’ve seen this week as a proposed solution – even as most recently revised – is inadequate insofar as it fails to correct the Supreme Court’s nonsensical stance that fertilized eggs are scientifically and legally equivalent to children.” Read more
The bottom line is that the current Alabama laws aim not only at restricting abortion options; they also affect fertility treatments denying basic medical care to women and families who need it.
Women are 50.8 percent of the USA population and they VOTE!
When women unite they are undefeated!
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!