Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed a bill shielding fertility clinics and patients receiving in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments from civil and criminal liability almost immediately after it was sent to her desk by the Republican-controlled state legislature on Wednesday night, cementing protections for providers less than a month after the Alabama Supreme Court’s seismic decision to equate frozen embryos with children.
“The overwhelming support of SB159 from the Alabama Legislature proves what we have been saying: Alabama works to foster a culture of life, and that certainly includes IVF. I am pleased to sign this important, short-term measure into law so that couples in Alabama hoping and praying to be parents can grow their families through IVF,” Ivey said in a statement, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
“IVF is a complex issue, no doubt, and I anticipate there will be more work to come, but right now, I am confident that this legislation will provide the assurances our IVF clinics need and will lead them to resume services immediately.”
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At least three clinics in the state immediately suspended treatment in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling last month, panicking over liability concerns should an embryo be damaged, destroyed, or discarded during transfer. The Alabama House and Senate—which voted for the bill 81-12 and 29-1, respectively—scrambled to pass the bipartisan immunity legislation in the hopes that it might allow the providers to resume services immediately.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham, the first health system to table IVF treatment, said in a statement to the Advertiser on Wednesday that it planned to “promptly” begin treating patients again. Doctors with Alabama Fertility, another paused clinic, told the Associated Press they would resume service “starting tomorrow.”
But Infirmary Health Systems and the Center for Reproductive Medicine, the facility at the center of the legal battle that led to the state Supreme Court’s ruling, said it was not yet ready to reopen services.
“At this time, we believe the law falls short of addressing the fertilized eggs currently stored across the state and leaves challenges for physicians and fertility clinics trying to help deserving families have children of their own,” it said in a statement to The New York Times.
The bill’s Republican sponsor, state Sen. Tim Melson, declared that he was “just elated to get these ladies back on schedule.”
The immunity proposal was embraced by Alabama Republicans, who nevertheless balked when asked by their Democratic counterparts to consider legislation to address the so-called issues of fetal personhood, or the conferring of legal status on fetuses and embryos.
“I think there is too much difference of opinion on when actual life begins,” Melson, a retired anesthesiologist, explained to the AP. “A lot of people say conception. A lot of people say implantation. Others say heartbeat. I wish I had the answer.”
The Alabama Supreme Court laid a hand directly on a third rail with its ruling, sparking a national outcry, upending the lives of IVF patients, and demonstrating the danger still posed to what remains of Americans’ reproductive rights in a post-Roe landscape.
It also touched off discussions among lawmakers in other states, including in Florida, where Republicans shelved a bill that would have allowed civil claims to be brought over the wrongful death of a fetus; and in Tennessee, where Republicans blocked a bill to enshrine access to IVF treatments and contraceptives, saying the clarification was unnecessary.
Both IVF and contraception are “legal here in Tennessee, and there’s not something that anybody is doing to not make that legal in Tennessee,” state Rep. Brian Terry (R) told the Tennessee Lookout.
