A friend of mine asked:
Is this the first time fertility clinics have been required to report to someone? What is it they expect to accomplish by passing this bill (SB 1376)?
I thought I’d share my answer with everyone and expand on it to explain the difference between In-Vitro Fertilization and abortion (trust me, there are people who don’t seem to know the difference), which is the issue hiding behind the bill.
All fertility clinics nationwide are already required to report all procedures and outcomes to the CDC. Arizona wants to duplicate that reporting within the state (with what funding nobody knows) and then study the need to regulate it (the study will also be funded from magic money).
The group behind this bill is behind bills in other states where proposed regulations basically eliminate the possibility of IVF. They equate IVF with abortion since not all created embryos are transferred (not all embryos survive to transfer day, and some people let that get their panties in a wad). IVF is the exact opposite of abortion.
I’ve had an ironic chuckle when I’ve gone to our specialist over the the last two years because his office is across the street from a Planned Parenthood clinic. What we were doing was everything possible to plan to be parents, pretty much the opposite of what was going on across the street.
The Tucson news paper finally acknowledged this bill today – Arizona Daily Star: Legislation on in vitro fertilization feared as step toward ban of process. The opening paragraph is exactly why we oppose this bill, “What’s being billed as a legislative study of in vitro fertilization could be the first step toward banning the process outright in Arizona.”
There are several red flags reading through the article from the sponsor and supporters, red flags that indicate they do not understand IVF. It seems they feel that couples using IVF, either with their own sperm and egg or through donors, basically adopting embryos, are not pro-life. Which means they feel that giving life to embryos is anti-life in some way. Which makes no sense. They are concerned about the long-term effects on the children of IVF, children who would not have life to begin with if it were not for IVF. They’ve heard a little about the scientific process but they have no depth of understanding of the emotional, mental, financial, spiritual process that IVF is, no understanding of what it really costs a couple to undergo IVF.
In an IVF cycle the woman injects hormones to stimulate her ovaries. Normally a woman’s ovaries make one egg a cycle (two in the case of fraternal twins, which is rare). The human body is designed to make one egg because humans don’t have litters. But for IVF you use hormones to make the ovaries make as many eggs, mature eggs, as possible.
Doctors use ultrasound to keep an eye on the ovaries. When the eggs are looking ready you do one last shot, a trigger shot of hcg, that finalizes the maturing process and gets the eggs ready to be retrieved. The clock is then ticking. At almost exactly 36 hours later the eggs need to be retrieved. Too soon and they won’t be mature enough, too late and they’ll pop out on their own and get lost in the fallopian tubes. (I hate that part. I’m a huge bundle of nerves all 36 of those hours.)
Retrieval is a minor outpatient surgical procedure. The doctor uses an ultrasound to guide a super long needle and retrieve as many eggs as he can. Then comes the “in-vitro” part, the “in glass” part. In a petri dish, not a test tube, the eggs and sperm are allowed to mix and mingle and get to know each other. Sometimes the doctor will set them up with a procedure called ICSI, injecting a single sperm into an egg.
And this is where those supporting personhood bills get all mixed up. Not all of the eggs will fertilize, just like happens in the fallopian tubes. Even some of the eggs that have a sperm injected into them don’t start to grow. Some of the fertilized eggs will start to grow as embryos for a bit but then stop, just like happens in the fallopian tubes. These embryos die. Just like in the fallopian tubes. Only when they die in a petri dish they don’t get flushed out of the woman’s body with her normal menstrual fluids with her suspecting nothing. When embryos die in a petri dish somebody, the doctor, knows about it. Rather than flushing them down the toilet or throwing them away on a tampon or pad, like an unsuspecting woman would do, the embryologist disposes of them as medical waste. THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS ABORTION! Disposing of dead embryos is not destroying them.
Even embryos that do grow well enough and get transferred, three or five days after retrieval, don’t all implant. Even naturally created embryos don’t all implant. We have transferred several embryos total during six cycles (three fresh and three with embryos that were previously frozen). We know three implanted based on blood tests at what would be two weeks after “ovulation.” The first two miscarried at 8 weeks and 5 weeks gestation, the third is currently treating my bladder like a trampoline. We did not murder the other embryos. They were not aborted. They simply did not implant. Such are the odds of life.
Personhood supporters make the jump from embryos not surviving long enough to transfer or implant clear to abortion (disposing of a dying embryo is the same as killing an implanted embryo in their minds), making embryos just for the heck of it because we can, and human/animal hybrids. Talk about leaps of logic!
Personhood supporters worry about selective reduction. In a country where parents must often pay entirely out-of-pocket for IVF they are going to try to stack the odds a bit and the chances of multiples increases slightly. In countries where IVF is supported by the government, Israel for example provides IVF for parents until they have two live births, doctors and parents can relax and transfer one embryo at a time, resulting in one baby, not multiples. Supporting IVF would reduce “selective reduction.” Making IVF more difficult is what makes multiples more likely.
We all know life is a miracle. Any couple that goes through the physical, mental, emotional, and financial rigors of IVF completely understands the miracle that life is, in a completely different way than other parents might (and apparently than some “pro-life” politicians too). IVF parents value the life of an embryo in ways others cannot. IVF parents have done everything they possibly can to give those embryos life. Putting reproductive technology, especially IVF, in the same category as abortion is wrong.
I love our embryos – all of them. If you heard me read this post to you out loud I’d be all weepy and choked up at the end. I hate that anyone thinks they had no right to even exist in the first place, even if I’ll never wrap them in a quilt.
I am an educator and PhD. I quilt, belly dance, run, read, and try to grow things. I am a Mormon. I am infertile. I am a daughter, sister, aunt, grand-daughter, friend, wife, and mom.
Brett L. Dennis
Mama g
Giggles
AmandaStretch
