With Alabama IVF patient in attendance, Biden to highlight reproductive care in State of the Union

Latorya Beasley, 37, has long had the first week of March marked on her calendar. But it wasn’t to attend the State of the Union as a guest of first lady Jill Biden.

After months of medication cycles, she was gearing up for an embryo transfer on March 4. But the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision on Feb. 16, which determined that frozen embryos were children and threw clinics there into intense legal uncertainty, upended the course of her treatment.

So, on Thursday night, she will instead find herself watching the president address the nation from the U.S. Capitol, using his speech to highlight the stories of women who’ve lost access to reproductive healthcare in the nearly two years since Roe s. Wade was overruled and criticizing Republicans for supporting abortion restrictions.

It will be a prominent theme, said an official who reviewed the president’s speech, and Biden will specifically mention IVF access in the fallout from the Alabama court decision.

Beasley, a Birmingham resident, has been doing fertility treatments on and off since 2019. In 2022, she successfully had a daughter through IVF, and last fall, Beasley and her husband decided to try for one more child.

They were nearly at the final stage of the process when the court ruling came down.

“I got a phone call and I don’t even know what she said,” Beasley said, describing the phone call from her provider, Alabama Fertility Treatments, advising her that her appointment was indefinitely delayed because they were pausing services, fearful of wrongful death lawsuits that could arise from handling embryos.

“Of course I was heartbroken. And then a few minutes later, the FedEx man rang the doorbell delivering [IVF] medicine. It was just like a gut punch,” Beasley said.

For the next two weeks, Beasley shared her story with lawmakers in her state Legislature and at the federal level, including a roundtable with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who traveled to Birmingham for a listening tour with IVF patients.

She made trips to Montgomery, the state capital, to rally with hundreds of other women pressuring lawmakers for legislation.

As legislation began to move through the State House, each political development carried medical implications for Beasley.

“It’s just one of those things that kind of is like, how does someone else get to dictate what I want for my family?” she said in an interview. “How does someone have so much control?”

Beasley and the other women and families who advocated at the State House were ultimately successful as of late Wednesday night, when state lawmakers passed a bill to give IVF clinics, patients and manufacturers “civil and criminal immunity” during IVF services, allowing enough legal cover for most of the paused clinics to reopen.

Beasley’s own clinic, Alabama Fertility Specialists, said it resumed the “full scope” of fertility services on Thursday.

“We have kept our lab fully operational so that we’d be positioned to resume care as soon as possible,” Dr. Janet Bouknight, a fertility physician at Alabama Fertility Specialists, said in an interview Wednesday.

But Bouknight, lawmakers and other patients involved in the legislative process all acknowledged that there will be more work ahead to protect IVF — something Biden is sure to highlight in his speech on Thursday at the U.S. Capital.

Biden, since the Alabama ruling came down three weeks ago, has criticized Republicans for laying the groundwork for reproductive health care restrictions by overturning the constitutional right to abortion nationwide.

“Make no mistake: this is a direct result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” Biden said in a statement shortly after the Alabama Supreme Court decision. Alabama has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country.

“My message is: The Vice President and I are fighting for your rights. We’re fighting for the freedom of women, for families, and for doctors who care for these women. And we won’t stop until we restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law for all women in every state,” Biden said.

In his State of the Union address, the president is expected to call on Congress to pass a bill that would legalize abortion services nationwide, as he has for nearly two years since Roe vs. Wade was overturned, and call Republicans out for blocking a vote that would’ve implemented national protections for IVF.

Biden will look to capitalize on the confusion and outcry caused by the IVF pause in Alabama, which pushed Republicans both in the state and at the federal level to try and walk a fine line of defending the anti-abortion ruling, but also issuing support for IVF and family building.

While Biden and his administration have repeatedly said they don’t believe they have many presidential avenues to safeguard reproductive healthcare without Congressional support — including shoring up protections for IVF nationwide — Biden is expected to mention their efforts so far in his speech, including a court battle to defend medication abortion and executive actions to protect travel for reproductive care services.