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A version of Senate Bill 169, the Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act, was passed by the Georgia Senate today. As an Atlanta resident who had IVF to become pregnant and is currently sitting on six frozen embryos, struggling with what to do next, this struck particularly close to home. From what I’ve been able to piece together (and the language of the bill is incredibly vague), it seems legislators in Georgia want to give embryos the same rights as you and me. What does this mean for my frozen embies? What about stem-cell research? Could they force me to have six more children? Could my embryos take me to court? It gets fuzzy.
I suspect that all of this is backlash to the octomom case, which makes me steaming mad. She was, after all, single—not infertile—and there is a difference. It scares me to think that this one case of an irresponsible doctor and an irresponsible mom could turn me into a criminal.
If the bill had passed in its original form, I simply wouldn’t have my precious twin boys. If this was law, because I’m just a squeak under 40, they would have only been able to attempt to fertilize two eggs. Odds are not in your favor there—just because you attempt to fertilize an egg does not mean it will fertilize. In my experience, we retrieved 19 eggs. Only 13 of those fertilized. I’m not good at math, but that’s certainly far from 100 percent success. And there are more obstacles, too. We implanted two of those 13. Of the remaining 11, only six made it to freeze. This gave me such great hope because if my first two had not taken, we would have had another chance. We could not have afforded to do a fresh IVF cycle again, but a frozen cycle is much less expensive. (It requires no surgery and far fewer drugs.) Also, if only one of our embryos had stuck, this gave us hope for a sibling later on down the line. Under this bill, freezing an embryo might be illegal. Hope would be gone for people like me.
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