Kansas Lawmakers Suggest Banning IVF Treatments in Potential Anti-Abortion Legislation

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and with it the constitutional right to an abortion, infertility patients and physicians have speculated that abortion legislation by the states could ban in virtro fertilization, or IVF, a common procedure among women having difficulty getting pregnant.These fears may get an early test when the Kansas state legislature returns to session in January.Earlier this year, lawmakers there penned a bill that would define life as beginning at fertilization and make both performing an abortion, conspiracy to perform an abortion, or the disposal of embryos in the course of an IVF treatment a felony in the state.The bill died in committee in May because the 2022 legislative session ended and it had not been voted on. In a conversation with the Kansas City Star, however, the Kansas house majority leader, Daniel Hawkins, said he has not ruled out considering it next year.Other legislators have expressed support for the bill, including a Kansas state senator, Mark Steffen, who argued that Kansans needed to pass a constitutional amendment on abortion so they can “make further laws — further refinement — with my goal of life starting at conception,” according to audio obtained by the Kansas Reflector.A spokeswoman for Kansas for Constitutional Freedom, Ashley All, said that if Kansas voters approve an amendment banning abortion from the state constitution, “the Kansas legislature will move quickly to pass the most extreme ban on abortion possible.“The bill they are on record supporting bans abortion completely, with no exception for rape or incest and only a very narrow exception for ectopic pregnancies,” she said.The law’s passage in Kansas would be dependent on an abortion referendum, which would decide whether to add an amendment to Kansas’s constitution explicitly stating that the constitution “does not create or secure a right to abortion.”If the amendment passed, the bill would then need to pass the Republican-controlled state house and senate. Although Kansas’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelley, may veto such a bill, Republicans currently command a supermajority in both the house and the senate that could override any veto.The bill defines “destruction of a fertilized embryo” during “the process of artificial insemination” as an “act of performing an unlawful abortion.”Because discarding embryos is a routine part of IVF treatment, this definition would effectively ban the procedure in Kansas or force patients and clinics to use workarounds and loopholes in the law, such as keeping unused and unwanted embryos frozen indefinitely.During IVF, eggs are collected from the mother and are fertilized in a lab environment. After between five days and seven days, these embryos are then either transferred to the mother or frozen for future implantation.Fertilizing more eggs than will be implanted is necessary so doctors can perform what is called “preimplantation genetic testing,” which screens embryos for potential genetic issues that would lead to implantation failure, miscarriage, or birth defects.Under the Kansas legislation, discarding those embryos would be considered an abortion and a felony in the state of Kansas. Such a bill would be the first in the nation to explicitly criminalize the disposal of embryos as part of artificial insemination. Louisiana’s legislature voted down a similar measure in that state, and Oklahoma carved out an exception for IVF in its recent abotion ban.A professor emeritus of philosophy at University at Albany, Bonnie Steinbock, argues that the law, as written, demonstrates lawmaker’s ignorance of how IVF and pregnancy work.“It does’t make any sense at all — how can there be an abortion prior to implantation,” she tells the Sun. “It’s not at all coherent — I don’t think it’s religiously motivated because it just doesn’t make sense.”She did, however, recognize the philosophical underpinnings of the Kansas legislature’s definition of life as beginning at fertilization, an argument most common in Catholic theology.The president of National Catholic Bioethics Center, John Hass, says more than “90 percent of the embryos created perish at some point in the process” and that parents are able to screen for genetic defects in embryos when choosing which one to proceed with, both of which run counter to Catholic teaching.For these and a variety of other reasons, Mr. Hass argues that procedures like IVF “do violence to the dignity of the human person” and treat “human life as a means toward an end, or a ‘manufactured product.’”Ms. Steinbock, however, notes that “before a certain point embryos don’t feel” and that most people would not consider embryos frozen for IVF to be people. “You can’t make them feel worse and you can’t make them feel better,” she tells the Sun. “The capacity to feel happens sometime in the second trimester, certainly after 15 weeks.”“To me if people are going to go through the onerous process of IVF they should have the best chances of having a happy and healthy pregnancy and baby,” she said.Given that polling on the issue shows that most people do not support banning IVF, the bill, if passed into law, could backfire on the Kansas GOP.“I doubt that it’s going to fly politically but in the meantime there are going to be some tragedies,” Ms. Steinbock said. “There are going to be women who want children who cannot have them and women that need medical care that will not receive it.”

Kansas Lawmakers Suggest Banning IVF Treatments in Potential Anti-Abortion Legislation

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