My husband and I have several frozen embryos in storage somewhere in suburban Rockville, Maryland. Over the past decade, this possibility to expand our family one day has held a place in our hearts. But now, we are rushing to fill out the paperwork to thaw and respectfully dispose of our embryos — before they potentially gain legal personhood status in this country.
In the summer of 2013, my husband and I decided to pursue expensive IVF treatment after suffering repeat miscarriages. I was 36 — the danger zone, according to reproductive experts at the time. I was told that after age 35, if it took a couple more than six months to successfully conceive, they should pursue reproductive assistance. For us it had been a year full of hopes and disappointments, as twice I had become pregnant and lost the pregnancies before the end of the first term.
We were thrilled when we found out that our first round of IVF had worked, and we now have a beautiful 8-year-old daughter. Over the years, the idea of giving her a sibling has crossed our mind routinely but as time went on, we realized that our “pack of three” was the best design for our family for reasons lengthier and more personal than I care to lay out here.
Nevertheless, we held on to our embryos out of sentimentality as much as anything else, each year paying the storage maintenance fees, knowing that we what we were really storing were faint dreams from a previous iteration of life that no longer existed.
When Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was first made public earlier this year, I immediately knew the urgency of the action our family needed to take. I sensed the changing winds of a patriarchy now more determined to oppress and more emboldened to tear away rights — especially those belonging to women and minority groups.
Since 2016 I have seen that the unthinkable can happen, over and over again, until up is down and down is up, and you can’t remember a world where there was the concept of an unthinkable thing. Now is not the time to sit and wait.
Now that Justice Alito’s draft has become reality and Roe is no longer, not only is a woman’s rightful choice to have an abortion imperiled, but so too are many commonly used infertility treatments. Many states already have “trigger laws” on the books that state that life begins at conception or fertilization, defining personhood as a status which occurs before implantation in a uterus. Roe v. Wade was the only thing keeping them from going into effect.
Maryland is thankfully progressive, ensuring safe abortion access and currently far from these states and their trigger laws, but, like I said, we’re not willing to take a chance. Now that rights are being stripped away and the 2022 and 2024 elections loom, a federal law outlawing abortion seems terrifyingly plausible.
Karla Torres, senior human rights counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Roll Call recently that she is concerned people using IVF and their doctors could face criminal liability for miscarriages, or freezing or discarding embryos. Likewise, Jody Madeira, the co-director for the Center for Law, Society & Culture at Indiana University’s law school and an expert on IVF and the law, told The 19th newsroom in May that trigger laws already on the books could lead to instant criminalization of abortion. One can intuit, by extension, that this could also instantly criminalize certain widely accepted IVF procedures, such as thawing and disposing of frozen embryos. As Madeira pointed out, “So the question now is what happens to embryos created in procedures. … if you freeze them now, is that manslaughter? If you destroy them now, is that manslaughter?”
And so, my husband and I are accelerating our efforts to ensure that our power to make the most personal of decisions is not ceded to the state.
How is this present-day America?
I vividly remember stepping onto a Union Station escalator on my way to work in January of 2013, descending to a floor where hundreds of protesters with signs were gathering to protest the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Some of the signs read “Life begins at conception.” It was one of the oddest moments of my life, as I was at the time nine weeks pregnant but had discovered only the night before that my pregnancy was no longer viable. I remember thinking wryly, “I wonder what these people would think of me if they knew?” Then I realized with a sense of absolute clarity — they shouldn’t know. It was none of their business.
