Crypto News: How Roe could threaten IVF

Hello, it's Carey in Boston, where I'm hearing that patients riding the infertility roller coaster have a new worry, this one stemming from the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade. But first ...

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Boston IVF, a major network of fertility clinics that reach far beyond Boston, has been getting quite a few calls lately from patients in states where abortion is either already banned or soon will be.

Patients are worried that abortion bans in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's recent decision on Roe v. Wade could also affect in-vitro fertilization. That's because IVF usually involves generating extra embryos that are never used. So if a future state law says life begins at conception, what does that mean for the hundreds of thousands of embryos sitting in fertility clinic deep freezers? And what does it mean for would-be parents who want to be able to discard embryos with genetic diseases or abnormal chromosomes?

It's not quite dire straits yet. Legal experts are clear that there's no immediate threat to IVF. (Read the full story here.)

A couple supporting abortion rights in Washington, D.C. Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg

"This ruling does not limit our ability to provide high-quality IVF services as we always have," TJ Farnsworth, the CEO of Inception, the biggest fertility provider in North America, told me. And, he says, Inception's legal analysts see "no indication that any state is contemplating limiting IVF care specifically."

Still, concerns remain. The battle over abortion in the US has now moved from the Supreme Court to the states — and it is unclear exactly what form future bans in some states may take.

The main concern is not that state lawmakers will target IVF, says I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in bioethics, but that "the language they adopt to prohibit abortion may inadvertently create questions about the status of embryos."

Sean Tipton, the spokesperson for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is not mincing words these angst-ridden days. Anti-abortion activists "are not in the mood to compromise," he says. "They are looking to slam that door shut as hard as they can and if infertility patients get their fingers stuck in that door, that's perfectly OK with them."

In the meantime, according to Resolve: The National Infertility Association, IVF treatments continue as usual. Their defenders are watching attentively what happens in state legislatures. — Carey Goldberg

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