When Nadya Suleman had her eight babies, I was outraged, just like most everyone else in this country. By now, we all know the galling facts: single mom with no job and six kids uses insurance money for IVF, bears octuplets, hires publicist and goes on media blitz.
What is even more galling is the reactionary legislation proposed in Georgia by Senator Ralph Hudgens to limit women's ability to pursue IVF. The bill was passed last night with major revisions, but it was a close call for reproductive freedom, and there is still pending legislation in Missouri and California (although the Missouri and California bills appear to be more about beefing up medical ethics enforcement than encroaching on my right to control my own body).
The highlights of the original Georgia legislation were:
- Require women to transfer all embryos created to the womb (which, ironically, is what Nadya Suleman did);
- Limit the number of embryos CREATED in a cycle to two or three, depending on the mother's age (before or after 40) ;
- Give embryos the full rights and legal status of a "human being"; and
- Create a duty of care from physician to embryo.
The bill's proponents would have us believe that this wasn't an attack on reproductive freedom. And yet, it is ALL about control -- wresting it from the patient and transferring it to the state. Based on the text of the original bill, what would happen if, for example, we created a bunch of embryos, but I suffered ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (a not uncommon side effect of IVF) and to transfer the embryos back would endanger my health? If my embryos have legal status as independent human beings, do their rights to transfer outweigh my right to do what's best for my health? What if my doctor recommends against transfer to preserve my health, freezes the embryos, and none of them implant after being thawed out? Has the doctor violated his duty of care by placing the embryos under additional stress via freezing? Should he be liable? Should he go to jail?
And how many IVFs would I need to achieve pregnancy if I could only create 2 embryos per cycle? We have at this point created about 40 embryos which were simply not genetically coded for survival. We didn't destroy them. In fact, we did everything humanly possible to help them thrive and grow, and they just didn't make it. That would have taken TWENTY attempts under the GA bill. Think Georgia's gonna pay for that? Of course not. And I would never have made it that far, because the idea is simply RIDICULOUS. (For the record, like the vast majority of IVF patients, we never transferred more than three embryos at a time. We were advised to transfer only one embryo on our first attempt, and we followed that advice. The three we transferred together had slow growth rates and about a 10% chance of making it.)
Don't get me wrong. Reproductive technology is a subject loaded with ethical issues. Public discussion and debate of those issues is good and necessary. But the decision to pursue IVF, and how, is an issue between doctor and patient.
We all share in the shock and awe of a situation gone bad, like Nadya Suleman's, and I am positive that the public backlash against her and her doctor will have a chilling effect on multiple embryo transfers, without any legislation involved at all. Its unfortunate that we don't see the same type of media coverage of all the situations of IVF gone RIGHT.
Finally, I have to mention two stellar examples of hypocrisy that stand out here: One, that no one has applied this kind of judgement and denigration to families giving birth the old-fashioned way (Exhibit 1: the Duggar family in Arkansas, who had their 18th child last year and got a congratulations from FOX and NBC and a reality TV show from Discovery). You don't see politicians trying to limit the number of children a person can have the old-fashioned way, regardless of their income, mental health, or criminal background.
Point Two is reserved for Senator Hudgens. As a self-described supporter of individual rights, personal responsibility and less government interference, he worked with right-to-life groups to create the GA legislation (more government intereference) to limit how many embryos a woman can create with IVF (because forget about personal responsibility) and what she can do with them (limiting individual rights).
There's a lot of information out there, much better researched and better-written than what I could write here. Please, take the time to read this and this and this, and stay alert so that similar legislation doesn't get passed through in your state.
My understanding of the bill's current status is that it was passed last night, but that the limits on IVF and the personhood issue were removed. It appears that the chief limitation of the law is the use of embryos for stem-cell research. Check here for updates.
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