I.V.F. Threats in Alabama Drive Clinics to Ship Out Embryos

A court ruling that deemed frozen embryos “children” has motivated some patients and clinics to move embryos out of red states. An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.

The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos were “unborn children.” Since then, at least four of Alabama’s seven fertility clinics have hired biotech companies to move the cells elsewhere. A fifth clinic is working with a doctor in New York to discard embryos because of concerns about the legality of doing so in Alabama.

Fertility patients outside of Alabama, too, are worried about how their precious embryos — specks of 70 to 200 cells barely visible to the human eye — might one day be affected by lawmakers who believe human life begins at conception. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, 14 states have passed total or near total abortion bans. And the Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted in June to oppose I.V.F., calling for the protection of “frozen embryonic human beings.”

While there is no official tally of the number of frozen embryos in the United States, experts estimate it’s in the millions. And many clinics are overwhelmed by a mounting inventory of cells that are sometimes years or even decades old.

Some patients are destroying embryos rather than worrying about the changing political winds. Ms. Zabel underwent I.V.F. in South Dakota in 2018, after her breast cancer diagnosis. She knew chemotherapy would permanently damage her eggs, making I.V.F. the only option if she wanted her daughter to have biological siblings.

She and her husband created five embryos at a clinic in Sioux Falls, S.D., and she became pregnant with one of them in 2022. But just days after Roe was overturned, she miscarried. She recalled hemorrhaging in the emergency room while her doctors debated whether they could treat her under South Dakota’s newly activated abortion ban.

Ms. Zabel later transferred two more embryos, one of which resulted in a baby. This summer, she asked her clinic to discard the two that remained. Although she had considered having a third child, she didn’t want to be caught in another situation where state laws limited her options. “The politics of our country are telling me what I can and can’t do with my body,” Ms. Zabel said.