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Do New Abortion Laws Make Me A Murderer?
The unintended consequences of legal cruelty
In the eyes of the Oklahoma legal system, I might be a murderer, depending on how everyday citizens interpret the new law that empowers individuals to sue anyone they deem guilty of defying the abortion ban. Fortunately, I don’t live in Oklahoma, and my potential crime occurred before the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.
No, I don’t have a uterus, and I never drove a pregnant woman to an abortion clinic. Nor am I a doctor, nurse, or in any way connected to the medical profession. But I am a father of two boys conceived via IVF in 2010 and 2012. After the birth of our second child, we faced a familiar problem among many IVF parents. We had leftover embryos but did not want any more children.
The fertility doctor told us to take some time and think about how we wanted to proceed, allowing us to leave the embryos in storage for a year before they started billing us.
These were the lowest quality embryos of the bunch, and we wanted to donate them to science, but the hurdles in doing so were onerous, and we lacked time to make the arrangements. As life marched on, we forgot about the embryos, and the fertility practice never contacted us.
Nine years later, a prominent New York City hospital purchased the practice and sought to get a handle on all the embryos IVF parents had left behind. They announced their purchase by sending us a bill for several thousand dollars in storage fees.
I called them, eager to express my vitriol at the outrageous fees. The administrator informed me that they were sending out invoices to initiate conversations with the owners of frozen embryos to determine what to do with them. We had three choices:
- Retain them but pay the backdated fees plus ongoing storage costs.
- Donate them to science. We’d be responsible for finding a researcher who wanted them and who could also arrange for proper transport.
- Discard them. The fertility clinic agreed to waive the back fees.
We chose the criminal option.
Discarding them was the only realistic choice. It didn’t make sense to keep embryos in…
