US Supreme Court Rejects Alabama Clinics’ Appeal of IVF Embryo Decision

The Supreme Court in Washington on Aug. 14, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

U.S. Supreme Court justices rejected an appeal of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that concluded that embryos from in vitro fertilization (IVF) are protected by law.

Justices on Oct. 7 turned away the petition from the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Mobile Infirmary Medical Center, which asked the court to consider whether the Alabama Supreme Court ruling violated rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The justices did not explain the decision.

IVF is a fertility treatment for couples struggling to conceive. The procedure combines a woman’s eggs with sperm in a laboratory, and the resulting embryos can later be implanted.

Alabama Supreme Court justices in February said that human embryos developed through IVF are protected under wrongful death laws, even though the embryos are kept outside the uterus. The case was brought by couples who sued after some of their embryos at the Center for Reproductive Medicine were destroyed after a patient went into the clinic and dropped them on the floor.

The Alabama Supreme Court said in an update in May, while declining to rehear the case, that the act applies to unborn children regardless of their location.

That prompted the request to the U.S. Supreme Court that said the clinics have been operating for years “with the logical expectation that Alabama’s civil wrongful death statute did not apply to the disposal of unimplanted embryos, a necessary byproduct of the in vitro fertilization services that petitioners provide.”

“By upending petitioners’ commonsense understanding of their statutory obligations, and by altogether ignoring Petitioners’ repeated submissions regarding Respondents’ lack of standing to prosecute the case, the Supreme Court of Alabama trampled on the fundamental due process protections that animate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the clinics told the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 7.

“That court’s failures implicate questions of exceptional importance related to the constitutional due process rights of each and every individual or entity, across the country, that finds themselves a litigant in a state or federal courtroom. Both issues are presented here and have been pressed or passed Upon by the Supreme Court of Alabama. This Court should grant certiorari.”

Under the Alabama Supreme Court decision, the clinics could now face criminal penalties for causing the death of minors, although Alabama’s governor has since signed legislation that protects IVF providers from prosecution and other legal action.

The clinics said in their petition to the U.S. Supreme Court that they do not think the Alabama law protects them against wrongful death litigation.

Lawyers for the couples who brought the original suit declined to address the nation’s top court before justices turned away the appeal.

The U.S. Supreme Court typically receives more than 7,000 petitions each year to review decisions by other courts, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The court usually accepts no more than 150 of those petitions. At least four of the nine justices must vote to accept a petition; otherwise, the petition is rejected.