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By Elizabeth Carr
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By the time my parents found IVF, they had run out of options.
In the 1980s, my mother survived three ectopic pregnancies: nonviable, potentially life-threatening pregnancies that implant outside of the uterus. After the third nearly killed her, doctors removed her last fallopian tube, meaning she could no longer conceive traditionally. A follow-up appointment included a one-page handout about an experimental IVF program in Virginia, inspired by the birth of Louise Brown in England on July 25, 1978, the day now recognized as World IVF Day. Weeks later, my parents were on their way.
While some of the costs were covered by the hospital running the program, my parents made trip after trip to Virginia for every blood draw, hormone injection, and monitoring appointment. My father used to joke that pursuing IVF was like buying a brand-new Ferrari every year for five years. It was an enormous amount of money, travel, uncertainty, and hope for one chance at a child.
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I was born in Virginia on December 28, 1981, and returned home to Massachusetts three days later to a blizzard and media frenzy.
Today, I am 44 years old. I am here because of extraordinary scientific advancements, because providers were willing to help, and because my parents were free to make their own deeply personal medical decisions in pursuit of a family.
Access to IVF was fragile then. The painful truth is that it is fragile again.
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At the time of my birth, IVF was not explicitly banned anywhere. It was too new for most lawmakers to understand. In the years since, policymakers in some states have enacted restrictions that complicate or restrict reproductive care, while others have proactively expanded access to family building medical treatments. Six years after my birth, Massachusetts became the second state to mandate insurance coverage for fertility treatments, including IVF, and in 2022, the state recorded the highest percentage of births involving fertility treatments in the country.
My story is a reminder that progress is never guaranteed, and options for families are not the same in every state. Unfortunately, they often depend on whether patients, physicians, and scientists are protected from political interference.
Now, the technology that gave me my life and granted my parents the opportunity to start their family is under attack across the country. In 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos could be treated as legal “unborn children” under the state’s wrongful death statute. For patients and providers, the consequences were immediate: clinics stopped services, families saw treatments delayed or canceled, and doctors were forced to ask whether standard fertility care could expose them to lawsuits or criminal liability.
The ruling turned deeply personal medical treatment plans into complicated, legal risk calculations almost overnight.
That is the danger of fetal personhood measures. They are intended to make abortion illegal, but their implications are far reaching. IVF depends on medical decisions about embryos: how many eggs to fertilize, which embryos to transfer, whether to freeze embryos for future use, and what to do with embryos that stop developing or are not used. These decisions belong to patients and physicians, guided by science, ethics, and patient consent. They do not belong in courtrooms or legislative chambers.
Some bills are framed less dramatically as transparency, reporting, or accountability. But when lawmakers require clinics to report how many embryos they create, freeze, transfer, lose, or discard, without a clear patient-safety purpose and without strong privacy protections, the result is not neutral oversight. It is surveillance.
Political interference does not make IVF safer. It makes care harder to obtain, more expensive, and less equitable, and undermines decades of progress in evidence-based reproductive medicine. Patients lose time they may not have. They lose money. They lose trust that their most private decisions will remain private.
Through years of advocacy, I've met parents who mortgaged homes, veterans who postponed retirement, cancer survivors racing against time, and adults conceived through IVF who are now raising children of their own. None of them were asking for a political talking point. They were simply asking for the chance to build a family.
IVF is not rare, and it is not elective in the way critics imply. In 2024, for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born through IVF in the U.S. in a single year, and it now accounts for three percent of all U.S. births. Behind each of those births is a family, a doctor, a laboratory team, and a set of decisions that should not be made under political threat.
Lawmakers cannot claim to support IVF while advancing policies that make it harder, riskier, or more expensive to provide. The right thing to do is to pass clear protections for patients and providers, reject fetal and embryonic personhood measures that threaten fertility care, protect the right of patients to make decisions about their own embryos, preserve physicians’ ability to practice evidence-based medicine, protect patient privacy, and expand insurance coverage so IVF is available to all families who need it.
When people debate IVF, they're often talking about embryos, regulations, or politics. I think about birthdays. Family dinners. Marathon finish lines. School plays. Careers dedicated to helping others. I think about the life my parents made possible when they were given the chance to pursue IVF—and I think about every family that deserves that same opportunity.
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