The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade immediately diminished the quality of health care provided to pregnant patients in states that ban abortion. Suddenly, obstetricians could no longer adhere to basic standards of care, and were instead forced by law to provide inferior—and often life-threatening—medical treatment to patients. Friday’s shock decision from the Alabama Supreme Court declaring that embryos are legally “people” will have a similarly devastating impact on the standard of care afforded to women struggling with infertility. The decision takes dead aim at IVF as it’s currently practiced, subjecting providers to ruinous damages (at best) and criminal prosecution (at worst). IVF clinics simply cannot operate under the draconian new constraints imposed by the court unless they adopt new, experimental techniques that are vastly more onerous and painful for patients. Judges are once again playing doctor, to the extreme detriment of women trying to build families.

Friday’s ruling involves an Alabama law called the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, though its implications stretch far beyond this one statute. The act allows the parent of a deceased child to collect punitive damages against a party who causes “the death of a minor child” through negligence. Here, the plaintiffs—who already conceived several children through IVF—accused a fertility center of violating the act by failing to secure their unused embryos. They alleged that a patient accessed the embryos without authorization, dropping and “killing” them. The plaintiffs claimed that the fertility center is liable under the act because their embryos qualified as “children.”

By a 7–2 vote, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed. The majority declared that the “natural, ordinary, commonly understood meaning” of the word child includes embryos (which the opinion dubbed “extrauterine children”). Incredibly, the majority said this was true when the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act was passed in 1872. That’s because, according to the majority, state lawmakers of the 1870s believed that the “unborn” qualified as full legal “persons” no matter their “physical location”—that is, inside a “biological uterus” or a “cryogenic nursery.”

This holding on its own has terrifying implications for IVF in Alabama. It means that a medical professional who inadvertently damages or destroys a microscopic embryo has maimed or killed a legal person and is on the hook........

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