What does Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling on embryos mean for Mississippi?

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under their state law – but what could that mean for you in Mississippi?

“It actually is counter to trying to help people have a family,” Dr. Randall Hines explained.

Dr. Randall Hines says in vitro fertilization or IVF specialists like he and his team, have one goal every day.

“We are about helping people have families, we think it’s one of the most important things in the world. And we’re doing everything we can to do that safely and effectively,” Dr. Hines said.

After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under their state law, patients could be at risk.

“The Alabama ruling would put us back into the 1970s in the way that we did in fertility care back then. You would have to obtain one egg, one sperm, and hopefully create an embryo – which wouldn’t happen in every case,” Dr. Hines said. “Then once you had an embryo, you would transfer that one embryo and if it failed, you’d start the whole process over.”

Now, freezing allows clinics to extract multiple embryos during one procedure and use them as needed by the patient.

According to a recent survey, four in ten adults say they have used fertility treatments or personally know someone who has. That number could decrease if costs go up.

“There would be repeated failures, patients would go through repeated procedures, it would be incredibly expensive and painful for the patient,” Dr. Hines explained.

With Alabama changing the landscape for how IVF is discussed – could Mississippi have a similar fate ahead? Dr. Hines doesn’t believe so.

“In 2011, there was a constitutional amendment in Mississippi, that would declare an embryo, a person. In the early days, that amendment was favored by a large percentage of people in polling. But when it came time to voting people soundly defeated that, because people became educated on what the implications of that would be for your sister, your daughter, your granddaughter, so forth, and so on,” Dr. Hines said.

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