By Makini Brice
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Elizabeth Carr, who 42 years ago became the first U.S. baby born through in vitro fertilization, hopes that her presence at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday will encourage lawmakers to learn more about the procedure.
Alabama’s state Supreme Court kicked off a furor last month when it ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children, prompting at least three providers to halt the procedure and sending Republican candidates scrambling to distance themselves from the decision by a panel of elected Republican judges.
“It was very clear in the Alabama ruling that the science of IVF was not truly understood,” Carr said in an interview.
IVF involves combining eggs and sperm in a laboratory to create an embryo.
The Alabama ruling was based on the state’s 2018 Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment approved by voters, which supports “the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children” and was intended to ban abortion.
That was a so-called trigger law meant to take effect if the U.S. Supreme Court ended the national right to abortion access, which it did in a 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
“If you believe that life begins upon fertilization – which essentially means in the Petri dish, which is what the Alabama ruling said – then you believe that what is created in a Petri dish is a life,” said Carr, who lives in Massachusetts and works at a pre-implantation genetic testing company.
“If, however, you believe, like I do, that an embryo cannot grow to its full potential and hit all the milestones it’s supposed to, unless it’s actually in a person – it’s not viable to survive and grow into a human being outside of a womb – then that’s really the key difference of where you believe life begins.”
Carr will attend Thursday’s speech – an annual spectacle where both parties use guests to bring attention to certain issues – as a guest of Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who co-sponsored a U.S. Senate bill meant to protect IVF access.
“We understand the hope that it gives to people grappling with fertility issues and a decision to stop it just seems heartless,” he said.
That bill was blocked last week, but Kaine said he will try to push for it to be considered in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and then put it up for a vote on the floor again.
Alabama Republicans have hastily passed legislation meant to protect IVF access, which the state’s governor, Kay Ivey, was expected to sign into law.
Carr’s parents turned to IVF after suffering three ectopic pregnancies, when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. Such pregnancies are non-viable and can be life-threatening to the mother.
“For my entire life, I’ve really kind of represented what everybody going through IVF hopes for, which is a child at the end,” Carr said.
(Reporting by Makini Brice; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)
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