Alabama Attorney General Takes Stand: IVF Providers Off the Hook from Prosecution

 The Alabama attorney general said Friday he doesn’t intend to use a recent ruling from the state Supreme Court to prosecute providers of in-vitro fertilization or families utilizing the service—after the decision led some providers to stop offering the service out of fear of prosecution.

 Attorney General Steve Marshall’s chief counsel Katherine Robertson said in a statement to Forbes on Friday that he “has no intention of using the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision as a basis for prosecuting IVF families or providers.”

The news came just days after multiple IVF providers, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system, said they would pause the offering after the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children.

The ruling didn’t ban in-vitro fertilization procedures, but would allow a state law that lets parents sue over a child’s wrongful death to apply to frozen embryos, meaning if embryos are discarded or damaged—both of which can happen through the IVF process—clinics could potentially face wrongful death lawsuits.

3. That’s at least how many providers said they were pausing in-vitro fertilization as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling.


Last week’s ruling from Alabama’s Supreme Court led to chaos and concern among providers of in-vitro fertilization who worried the judgment opened them up to wrongful death lawsuits. Through IVF, eggs are extracted and fertilized outside of a patient’s body to create embryos that are then placed back in the uterus, but oftentimes more embryos are made than are used by patients. Embryos that are not used for implantation are often donated or discarded, but after the ruling some providers were worried they would have to consider the legality of destroying or donating unused embryos. In the ruling, the all-Republican Alabama Supreme Court said frozen embryos are children. Justice Jay Mitchell wrote that “unborn children are ‘children’ … without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics.” One judge on the Court wrote in dissent that “many Alabama citizens praying to be parents” would lose the opportunity with the ruling and “there is no doubt that there will be fewer babies born.”


The statement from Marshall’s office came around the time former President Donald Trump broke his silence on the matter, saying he strongly supports protecting in-vitro fertilization. “We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder!” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. “That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America.”