450,000 Cycles, 100,000 Births
The United States performs roughly 450,000 IVF cycles per year, resulting in over 100,000 births. For millions of Americans, in vitro fertilization is the only path to biological parenthood. It is standard medical care, practiced for over four decades, that has brought millions of children into the world.
450,000 IVF cycles per year. Over 100,000 births. Personhood bills in 14+ states could make standard procedures illegal.
Standard IVF typically creates more embryos than are transferred. The remaining embryos are frozen for future use, donated to other families, donated to research, or discarded. This is how the medicine works. It is how it has always worked. Personhood legislation would change that.
What Personhood Bills Do
Personhood bills grant legal rights to fertilized embryos from the moment of conception. If an embryo is a person, then discarding an unused embryo is destruction of a person. Freezing an embryo raises questions about custody and care obligations. Selecting the most viable embryo for transfer means making a decision about which “person” gets a chance at life and which does not.
At least 14 state legislatures have introduced personhood bills. More than a dozen states already have laws that could be interpreted as granting rights to embryos outside the body. Alabama’s supreme court already ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law, triggering a pause in IVF services across the state before the legislature intervened.
Louisiana law already forces fertility providers to ship embryos out of state for destruction because doing so within state lines could violate the law.
The Contradiction
Both parties have publicly stated support for IVF. Polling shows that Americans overwhelmingly support access to fertility treatment. Yet the same legislatures passing abortion bans are introducing personhood bills whose logical consequences threaten the most common fertility treatment in America.
The bills are not framed as anti-IVF. They are framed as protecting life from the moment of conception. But IVF, by its nature, creates embryos that will not all become people. If every embryo is legally a person, then IVF as it is practiced today becomes legally untenable.
Some states have introduced protections for IVF providers and coverage mandates that require insurance to cover fertility treatment. The map is splitting the same way it split on abortion, gender-affirming care, and marriage equality.
Read more on the Reproductive Rights hub and the Dobbs anniversary brief.