Kindbody is predominantly run by women, and more than 50 percent of both the clinic and corporate teams are BIPOC, which is notable, considering the fertility industry has historically been white and male. The company’s doctors don’t wear white coats or hang their medical degrees on their office walls. They don’t have offices at all, in fact; they meet with patients in exam rooms that have the same cozy, living-room vibe as the clinic’s lobby. When Bartasi and her team designed the flagship New York City clinic, they purposely sought to avoid the cold and sterile feel of traditional medical exam rooms and instead took design cues from Soho House, the global chain of private members’ clubs, and branding inspiration from Drybar and SoulCycle. Months from now, I’d step into Kindbody’s Denver clinic and have déjà vu from my Manhattan visit; all Kindbody clinics, like all Starbucks stores, look and feel the same.
The day after the Fertility 101 gathering, I sat down with Bartasi in one of Kindbody’s conference rooms, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. She wore a blue sheer blouse and small silver hoops; glasses were perched atop her chestnut hair; her nails were unpolished, and she had on a hint of red lipstick. A can of seltzer and a rose-gold MacBook sat on the large glass table, where a few signature-yellow Kindbody pens lay scattered. I recalled that she’d had children via IVF and asked her if she wished she had frozen her eggs when she was younger. “I should’ve, could’ve, would’ve,” she replied in her southern accent, lamenting that when she was in her thirties vitrification had yet to be developed and egg freezing technology was not yet reliable. “I’m an eternal optimist,” she went on. “I think most entrepreneurs have to be. I try to always look forward and think, ‘Okay, what train do I have to catch to be home for taco Tuesday with my kids tonight?’ So I always think about the future instead of the past. No regrets.” It’s a mindset Bartasi has centered Kindbody around: help women live a life free of regret by helping them have children in their own time frame. Doing so means building brand loyalty with women in their mid-twenties who will come back at age thirty-five and forty-two and even fifty, offering a continuum of care from their first OB/GYN visit to the birth of their last child.
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Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos was in Walgreens. Modern Fertility is in Target. Kindbody is near enough to your office building for you to pop by on your lunch break. The Kindbody educational session I attended may have moved on from the EggBanxx event I went to years earlier, but the hors d’oeuvres and low-grade anxiety filling the room sure felt similar. And the fanfare around eggs and fertility testing had skyrocketed.
By now, I’d spoken with several experts who expressed concern about women seeing egg freezing as a commodity. I’d learned about the new business models cropping up in the femtech sector. I’d taken in the alarming language being used in features written about the industry in general (aggressively expand; target women; it’s an insurance policy; it’s control) and the breezier verbiage of egg freezing articles in particular (break free from your fertility; empowering, efficient, cutting-edge; it’s like freezing time). The headlines I read were eyebrow-raising: “Femtech Shows the Way to Billion-Dollar Opportunities” (Forbes), “The Race to Hack Your Period Is On” (Elle), “The Women Who Empty Their Savings to Freeze Their Eggs” (BBC), “Can Silicon Valley Get You Pregnant?” (Fast Company), “The Dawn of the Femtech Revolution” (McKinsey & Company).
The media hype reflects a new phenomenon: Egg freezing is a booming sector of the multibillion-dollar femtech industry. The influx of private equity and slew of venture-capital-backed start-ups have pumped a ton of money into what was not very long ago a niche area of ART. There are egg freezing concierge services, acupuncturists, egg hormone experts, and nurses who moonlight as on-call fertility coaches, going to people’s homes to walk egg freezing patients through the injections. The target demographic of new companies specializing in egg freezing is women in their late twenties and early-to-mid thirties. In lieu of the typical medical experience, these companies offer sleek décor and top-notch customer service to help brand the procedure as a logical, savvy choice, not unlike researching mutual funds or charting a path from renting to mortgage. “Just like Uber, Seamless, Spotify, and Tinder,” an article in The Cut read, the new egg freezing companies “cater to the millennial desire for infinite options and a user experience that’s more stylish and efficient than the traditional clinic.”
Dr. Joshua Klein worked at Reproductive Medicine Associates (RMA) of New York, one of the country’s most prominent fertility centers, before co-founding Extend Fertility, the boutique clinic I visited to see egg freezing in action. His move follows a trend wherein the few big prestigious institutions that dominated the fertility industry have splintered into small, nimble clinics able to operate—and flourish—without the associated overhead. Extend Fertility was innovative because when it opened in 2016, it was the first medical practice in the world to focus exclusively on egg freezing.[*2] Until then, a woman could freeze her eggs only at one of the country’s large fertility centers. At these bustling IVF-focused facilities, where egg freezing is certainly not the priority and often an afterthought, waiting rooms are typically full of couples there because they need medical help to have a baby. It is not a particularly welcoming environment for, say, a woman in her early thirties who is curious about the possibility of delayed childbearing or a transgender man interested in fertility preservation before beginning gender-affirming medical care. In terms of marketing, IVF patients want to see pictures of happy babies on the walls, diapered and smiling. Egg freezers, by contrast, are typically women sitting alone in those same waiting rooms, and they don’t particularly want to see images of babies—not then. This subtle but important difference between consumers—one seeking a baby now, one seeking to preserve her ability to have a baby later—is the raison d’être for the popular egg-freezing-first clinics. These sleek facilities often tout the procedure as breezy and accessible, an investment in one’s reproductive future, the fertility equivalent of a 401(k). But what egg freezing patients gain at these spa-like, picturesque clinics can sometimes, as we’ll see, come at a cost.
“A Baby or Your Money Back”: Paying for Egg Freezing
Speaking of which, fertility treatment of any kind is expensive, and financing it is beyond the realm of possibility for most Americans. So when it comes to egg freezing, cost can be a major barrier. For many women, it’s the most significant obstacle by far. I mentioned earlier that egg freezing in the United States costs an average of roughly $16,000 per cycle. The two major components: the cost of treatment and the cost of hormone medications. Each cost varies, by clinic and by patient. The clinic will likely charge the patient around $7,000 to $10,000 for treatment—including monitoring, the egg retrieval (with anesthesia), and vitrification—and the fertility meds, which she buys separately from a specialty pharmacy and injects herself, will cost around $3,000 to $6,000 or more.[*3] Egg storage costs about $500 to $1,000 per year.[*4] Keep in mind that these are rough estimates for one cycle of egg freezing. A fact that many fertility clinics and articles about egg freezing rarely mention: Most women undergo more than one cycle—on average, 2.1 cycles—so of course these costs increase if a patient does multiple cycles. The typical egg freezing patient in the United States is therefore looking at a total price tag of upward of $30,000. And that doesn’t include the cost of using her frozen eggs down the road—which entails thawing and fertilizing the eggs, developing embryos in the lab and testing them for genetic abnormalities, then transferring them to the woman’s uterus. All that’s another $15,000 to $20,000, at least.
“Welcome to the fertility casino,” The New York Times said in an article about the latest trends in fertility clinics’ package deals. As more and more women want to freeze their eggs but balk at the prohibitive price tag, various business models have sprung up to help them afford the procedure, offering financing options and helping them coordinate coverage. I’ll talk more in a moment about how insurance coverage, employer benefits, and self-pay options help people afford egg freezing, but first, let me set the scene of fertility financing’s contemporary landscape.
I first learned of fertility financing companies when I read a Forbes article topped by the headline “Meet Prelude Fertility, the $200 Million Startup That Wants to Stop the Biological Clock.” Prelude is a lucrative private-equity-backed start-up created in 2016 by Argentine serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. Soon after it launched, Prelude began aggressively acquiring fertility clinics around the United States, and is now one of the largest networks of fertility centers in North America. Varsavsky “envisioned a new norm for reproduction, one that would anticipate infertility rather than simply react to it. Young people in their reproductive prime could freeze their sperm or eggs in their twenties, live their lives, pursue careers, and then, when they finally met the right person, thaw their frozen gametes,” a New Yorker article described. Varsavsky, who often touted the line “Sex is great, but not to make babies” while raising funds for the company, called his vision the Prelude Method. The aim was to own every step of a fertility patient’s journey, starting with egg freezing in their twenties and ending with a baby in their thirties or forties.
Initially, the Prelude Method started at $199 a month for the four-step process: egg freezing, embryo creation, genetic screening, and embryo transfer. A patient could choose between two product plans and, after plunking down several thousands of dollars up front, pay a couple of hundreds of dollars each month, sort of like a car layaway plan. Now, the company directs potential clients to a fertility clinic in its network, then provides financing options via third-party companies for services a patient will undergo. In 2019, Varsavsky joined forces with T. J. Farnsworth, a healthcare entrepreneur, who was building a similar chain of fertility practices in Texas and Georgia. Prelude, which now owns more than eighty clinics in the United States and Canada, offers its fertility treatment packages via Bundl, the company Farnsworth started, which combines ART procedures and charges customers a package price. Bundl also promises patients a baby or their money back.
When I finished reading the Forbes article, I felt a little sick to my stomach. I was still coming to terms with egg freezing’s high price tag; who has a spare $30,000 lying around to pay for this? Not me. I found myself calculating the cost of the egg freezing packages over the years one would need them, and getting a little panicky thinking about a near future where egg freezing and storage is just one of a young professional woman’s usual fixed costs, like rent or car insurance. Which, it turns out, is exactly how Prelude wants women like me to think about reproduction—and that was another aspect that made me queasy. It was the “commanding every aspect of a woman’s fertility” bit that bothered me about Prelude’s business model and mission to dominate the market, along with its subliminal messaging: Invest in your fertility now so you don’t have to resort to buying your way out of infertility later. “We are now targeting women in their 20s and early 30s,” Susan Herzberg, then Prelude’s president, told The New York Times in 2018. It’s smart from a business perspective, of course: The earlier a woman freezes her eggs, the more money she’ll shell out to keep them on ice until she’s ready to use them. A convenient omission by companies like Prelude, however, is the fact that the vast majority of women who have frozen eggs to date haven’t returned to thaw them.
The goal of helping people finance fertility treatment the way they might pay for a car, though, makes sense—even if it sounds icky—especially for millennials and Gen Zers who need help affording what for many of them is the largest out-of-pocket health expense they’ve ever encountered. That’s what led Claire Tomkins to co-found Future Family, which offers sixty-month loan plans for IVF or egg freezing, including discounted lab work and medications, and a “fertility coach” to field questions and help patients navigate their treatment. Other fertility entrepreneurs have expanded into financial products to address cost barriers and appeal to the “buy now, pay later” mindset; their companies partner with fertility clinics to attract customers and offer payment plans similar to Future Family’s to help patients finance treatment.
Fertility clinics now extend all sorts of finance options on their own to both entice patients and ease their minds. Some clinics offer egg freezing discounts for women with a medical diagnosis, for transgender men, and for women in the military. Some offer “freeze with friends” deals: Southern California Reproductive Center ran a promotion saying if three friends freeze eggs together, each receives 30 percent off; Ova, a clinic in Chicago, advertises on its website, “The more friends in your circle who freeze together, the bigger the discount!” There’s an increasingly popular “freeze and share” hybrid model, where a woman can freeze eggs for free or at a discount when she donates half of her retrieved eggs to an egg donor program or to prospective parents who can’t otherwise conceive. There are also package or “shared risk” programs for when patients return to use their frozen eggs—this offsets the high risk of IVF cycle failure.[*5] Shady Grove Fertility, which has dozens of clinics nationwide, offers a more-or-less “satisfaction guaranteed” program in which qualifying egg freezing patients pay a flat amount for unlimited attempts to get pregnant with their frozen eggs. At Spring Fertility, where Mandy froze eggs, if a patient freezes at least twenty eggs before age thirty-five or thirty eggs before age thirty-eight at one of the company’s clinics and doesn’t get pregnant when she returns to use them, she is refunded all of the money she paid to Spring for freezing and attempting to use her eggs.
Fertility clinics and for-profit companies they partner with are financially incentivized to sell egg freezing and IVF. They pitch programs and packages that go like hotcakes; many patients end up losing money on them, while others save. That’s the reality of fertility treatment’s capitalistic backdrop. The way I see it: Fertility financing companies aren’t the enemy, and many do a good service helping people pay for incredibly expensive procedures. But while efforts to make egg freezing more affordable are one thing, aggressively targeting young women to sell them on a procedure they may not need, or that may not pan out, is another. It’s an aspect of egg freezing’s bigger picture I would come to be increasingly troubled by.
The fertility financing scene is…a lot. But onward to the pragmatics of paying. In lieu of or in addition to leveraging a shared risk program or fertility treatment loan, many women turn to other avenues to help them afford egg freezing, particularly their health insurance or employer.
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When it comes to paying for egg freezing, we need to talk about three things: state insurance regulations, employer-offered fertility benefits, and self-pay.[*6]
The short answer to the question Does health insurance cover egg freezing? is that it depends. In the United States, private health insurance, which includes employer-sponsored plans (known as group plans), is regulated at the federal level and more heavily at the state level, and laws often address which healthcare services must be covered by group and individual plans. As of September 2023, twenty-one states and Washington, D.C., have laws requiring insurance companies to cover or offer some variation of fertility testing, diagnosis, or treatment. But each of these states can define “fertility coverage” however it sees fit, and they vary considerably in their entitlements, including how long a person has struggled with infertility before qualifying for treatment, what sort of treatment is covered, whether same-sex couples and unmarried individuals are covered, and more.
The list of states that offer fertility treatment coverage has been growing steadily since the 1980s, though benefits vary widely. Here are a few state-specific examples (accurate as of this writing). Massachusetts, which has one of the most generous laws, requires insurers that provide pregnancy-related benefits to also cover infertility diagnosis and treatment, which includes IVF and egg freezing, among other procedures. Delaware, New Hampshire, and New Jersey have comprehensive infertility coverage, including for the pricey fertility meds. In New York and Colorado, certain patients are eligible for up to three rounds of IVF and are covered for medically necessary fertility preservation procedures, such as freezing eggs or sperm before undergoing cancer treatment. California does not require insurers to cover fertility treatment; if employers choose to offer it as part of their employee health benefit package, IVF isn’t included. The opposite is the case in Texas, where insurers must offer IVF, and if employers elect to extend the benefit, patients must have a history of five continuous years of infertility or meet a long list of criteria to qualify for coverage. Also, the patient’s eggs must be fertilized only with her spouse’s sperm, rather than a donor’s. The spouse’s-sperm-only stipulation is also the case in Hawaii and Arkansas, once again effectively excluding same-sex couples and single people. Finally, some states place age limits on female patients who can access fertility benefits—a woman in New Jersey, for example, must be under the age of forty-six to be eligible; in Rhode Island, she must be between the ages of twenty-five and forty-two—and others place restrictions on marital status.
To put it bluntly, the United States has never considered any sort of fertility treatment worthy of widespread subsidized healthcare coverage. Most of the mandates stipulating that private insurers cover some fertility treatments are geared toward infertility, and in the majority of cases, as I’ve said, a person must have a diagnosis of infertility from a doctor in order to qualify for coverage.[*7] This is problematic in that it doesn’t apply to same-sex couples who aren’t infertile; they’re just not in a situation where they can achieve pregnancy via sex (more on ART access issues and how these laws affect LGBTQ+ people shortly). It also doesn’t apply to healthy women wanting to proactively freeze eggs.[*8] While some insurance mandates include at least partial coverage for fertility preservation due to medical conditions, there is no coverage for egg freezing without a medical reason or for proactive fertility testing (discussed in chapter 6) without an infertility diagnosis.
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Employer coverage for fertility is a different story. Many private sector companies have changed their healthcare coverage plans to include ART for less limited reasons. Apple and Facebook, back in 2014, were among the first large firms to announce that their insurance plans would cover egg freezing for employees for non-medical reasons. By 2017, egg freezing was the hot new perk in Silicon Valley. At first it was mainly tech and finance companies that covered it; then new media companies, start-ups, and universities began extending the benefit, too. As of 2021, 19 percent of large U.S. employers offered egg freezing, compared to just 6 percent in 2015. No longer a nice-to-have perk, fertility treatment coverage in general has become a staple in many employers’ healthcare packages: More than 42 percent of large U.S. employers, and 27 percent of smaller companies, offer IVF benefits.[*9]
Back to Progyny, one of the largest publicly traded femtech companies, which partners with companies to manage fertility benefits for employees. An employer decides to offer fertility benefits to its employees; Progyny then manages all aspects of those benefits, connecting members to its network of more than 950 fertility specialists, covering fertility medications under Progyny Rx, and overseeing treatment. Each member receives access to a “patient care advocate,” who helps the patient coordinate appointments, connects the patient to an on-demand nurse for help with fertility meds, and even offers emotional support. (Um, wow.) Progyny’s more than 370 clients include Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
Becca, while working at Google, froze twenty eggs thanks to the company’s Progyny benefit, and doubts she would’ve frozen her eggs without it. When she froze, she was thirty-seven and single and didn’t know if she wanted kids. “But I wouldn’t want my fertility to be the reason I couldn’t be with someone I fell in love with, if kids were very important to him,” she told me when we spoke on the phone a few days after the procedure. To Becca’s relief, the week of her egg retrieval was a relatively calm one at work. Becca’s boss, who was male, knew she was freezing her eggs, but her colleagues—also mostly men—didn’t. “There was a part of me that didn’t want to make people feel uncomfortable,” she said, adding that she also didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that she was thirty-seven and unpartnered. “Almost everyone I know at work that’s my age is married and has kids,” she said. “The fact that I’m single at my age feels a little bit like a failure, like I’ve done something wrong. And so it’s not something I like to highlight to the people I’m trying to instill confidence with.” A year later, Becca told me that freezing her eggs helped her realize that having a kid isn’t critical to her being happy in life. She also more confidently pursued things she wanted—a new job, a location change, and a partner. “There’s so much more to life than whether or not you’re fertile,” she said, with a satisfied sigh.
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How do people without insurance benefits or employer coverage afford egg freezing? Since I fell into that boat, I’d been mulling for months over how I would manage to pay for the procedure. Dr. Noyes had offered me a medical discount for freezing, since in the clinic’s view my having one ovary was a sort of “condition,” but I was having trouble getting my health insurance to agree.[*10] After I published my first story about egg freezing, my mother emailed me: Great article! Maybe an egg freezing place will contact you to freeze your eggs at no cost![*11] Women often freeze their eggs in their mid-thirties, just as they enter prime wealth-building years. For some, that means depleting their savings, going into debt, and/or delaying goals such as homeownership in order to self-finance egg freezing. They take out loans, mortgage their houses, borrow from 401(k) accounts, start GoFundMe campaigns, or take on second jobs in order to afford one or more cycles. Increasingly, many women travel abroad for a better deal; egg freezing is a fraction of the cost in countries like Spain and the Czech Republic. I would need to look into every possible way to get the dollar signs down, because the more I scrutinized egg freezing costs, the more clearly I saw it as a financial impossibility.
Remy paid for egg freezing by taking out a $20,000 personal loan and charging the meds to a credit card. She also sold her engagement ring—“extra cash for the eggs,” she told me—and took on additional shifts at the hospital. Sometimes alimony can finance egg freezing; I read about cases in which women fought hard for egg freezing to be paid for by their ex-husbands as part of their divorce settlements—and won. There are nonprofit organizations that provide fertility treatment scholarships and grants. Often, families help, as Mandy’s offered to. A few years ago, Valerie,[*12] a Chicago woman who froze her eggs in her early thirties, began documenting her experience on a blog and a weekly podcast. When she started her project, her respondents were mostly in their late thirties. Now she hears from women in their mid-twenties whose grandparents want to help finance the procedure, as they might a down payment for a house. She also gets calls from parents with teenagers and college-age daughters, who see egg freezing as a future gift and are willing to foot the bill—the return on investment coming in the form of a grandchild down the road. Danielle, a thirty-nine-year-old in Dallas who did two rounds of IVF before getting pregnant, echoed this, telling me: “My husband and I are not going to pay for our daughters’ weddings one day, but we will pay for them to have their eggs frozen when they’re in their twenties.”
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“We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay too much,” writes Jia Tolentino in her essay collection Trick Mirror. She was referring to the wedding industry and trendy workouts like barre and the world of beauty and wellness in general, but when I read that sentence I immediately thought about a woman’s eggs. A modern-day young woman learns her eggs are precious upon discovering they are something of a commodity. Her eggs are fragile, and every moment brings them closer to expiration. It makes sense, then, at least on an emotional level, that it costs thousands of dollars to freeze them, and thousands more down the road to use them. For many women, egg freezing is both exorbitantly expensive and the easiest money they’ve ever spent.
Dr. Lora Shahine, a reproductive endocrinologist in Seattle, summed it up to me like this: “I think of egg freezing as this incredible opportunity. It’s very empowering, it’s wonderful, but the way it’s sold as insurance and a guarantee is really scary.” If a woman works at a company like Amazon or Google, she went on, “egg freezing is a no-brainer. For them, the financial pressure is really eased. So that’s a real win. It shouldn’t change someone’s family goals. But it can relieve a large burden and allow people to feel a little bit more free.”
The people benefitting from egg freezing and being courted by fertility clinics, though, are a specific subset: predominantly white middle- to upper-middle-class professionals in their thirties. Prohibitively high costs make egg freezing and IVF impractical, if not impossible, for many people, especially those with lower incomes. And so, I realized, it isn’t just that egg freezing is a new and complicated technology. Or that it’s really expensive. When I began to learn more about the inequalities in access to treatment, I realized it was more about the ways in which fertility is a privilege, not a right.
Embryo Destruction Meets Anti-Abortion
A revolution of sorts might have been taking place in the femtech world, but elsewhere, the opposite was happening. In 2017, Donald Trump’s administration, with evangelical Mike Pence at the helm as vice president, began to dismantle reproductive freedoms—and many other civil liberties—on its first days in office. Although the landscape changed under President Biden, reproductive rights remain fragile, and the abortion battleground is particularly inflamed. The year 2021 was an especially dark time for abortion access, with more than a hundred new restrictions passed. Americans gained a constitutional right to abortion in 1973. In 2022 they lost it when the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, delivered the most consequential abortion decision in five decades by overturning Roe v. Wade and striking down the nationwide right to abortion. The modern climate with regard to abortion access is anxiety-inducing, to say the least, but the more terrifying reality is that the laws in development threaten anyone with a uterus, and have implications beyond a woman’s ability to not remain pregnant if she doesn’t want to.
Women’s judgment about our own bodies and futures cannot be trusted, politicians insist, so our reproductive systems must be controlled by lawmakers—overwhelmingly, older white men. The Court’s ruling leaves it up to states to dictate abortion access, without requiring state bans to include exceptions of any kind. While some states are trying to make abortion access more robust, other states are aggressively pushing to limit the scope of when abortions can be performed. As of December 2023, twenty-one states now ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade. Several states ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy—which is before many women know they are pregnant.
The new abortion bans have had a less recognized effect—namely, creating confusion and legal questions about the practice of discarding embryos, which is a normal part of IVF. That’s the nature of the technology; creating multiple embryos is the point. Those with the greatest chance of developing into a healthy baby are used first, and the excess embryos are typically frozen, until the person or people who made them decide to use or discard them. As long as IVF is here to stay, so too is the reality of leftover unused embryos on ice. But IVF and related fertility treatments may not, in fact, be here to stay.
The current configuration of the Supreme Court has already begun to impact the state of reproductive rights in the United States for decades to come; it has also called into question the status of legal rights for women undergoing fertility treatment, as well as their doctors. “The United States has a political debate about abortion that has spilled over into everything that has to do with embryos,” Alta Charo, a retired professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told The New Yorker in 2023. The abortion bans could mean impaired access to ART. The concern is that as some states rush to pass fetal personhood bills, they may inadvertently or purposely ban IVF. Some states specifically exempt IVF from their abortion bans, but in others, restrictive “personhood laws” have been passed that use murkier language—such as specifying that life begins at fertilization, when an egg becomes an embryo, as opposed to the implantation of an embryo or a fetus being viable—and leave several stages of the fertility treatment process vulnerable to government interference, opening up the legal terrain for states to interfere with IVF and curtail patients’ access to care. If the bans are interpreted as granting embryos legal rights and protections, a fertilized egg would have the same rights as a child. Yet even if the two are deemed legally equivalent, they are decidedly not biologically equivalent, and giving an embryo “personhood” status raises all sorts of questions about what can be done with embryos created outside the body.
Experts have been worried about the impact of abortion bans on IVF for years. Many anti-abortion activists object to embryos being destroyed due to genetic screening results or because people have finished building their families. Legal experts predict that the new state abortion bans could make it easier to place controls on genetic testing, storage, and disposal of embryos. Parts of the IVF process could become illegal; in some states, it could be banned altogether. In states where the law dictates that life begins at fertilization, frozen embryos could be defined as unborn children under law, and discarding unused or frozen embryos could be criminalized (although it’s worth noting that even within the anti-abortion movement, this view of IVF and what’s created through ART is considered extreme).
What could it mean practically if laws banning embryo destruction were to pass? Fertility clinics might choose to limit the number of embryos created per cycle to try to avoid having any “extra,” but that could mean more expensive and invasive cycles until someone successfully gets pregnant. Doctors who perform IVF and discard unused frozen embryos in accordance with their patients’ wishes may be prosecuted. Fertility patients in states where the use of ART is questionable might find it necessary to have their eggs and sperm collected in-state, then shipped to a clinic in a state where the legal climate is less volatile and their eggs or embryos won’t exist in limbo—a workaround that adds another cost and burden to the already burdensome process of fertility treatment.[*13]
