WHAT DO WE OWE THIS CLUSTER OF CELLS?
On June 24, 2022, the same day the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I received a call from the fertility clinic where I’d been undergoing in vitro fertilization, informing me that seven of my fertilized eggs had made it to the five-day-old blastocyst stage.
The next morning, I went to the clinic, lay down on a table and watched on a black-and-white screen as one of the seven — the one the embryologist had deemed the most likely to develop into a child — was transferred into my uterus. It was an unsettling moment to find myself responsible for half a dozen embryos. The Supreme Court’s ruling was, first and foremost, about abortion. But it was also, explicitly, a statement about the importance of “potential life,” a phrase that appears repeatedly in the opinion. Such a ruling in our political environment would surely set in motion some unexpected and, in some cases, unintended consequences.
An embryo, in medical terms, is a fertilized egg through the eighth week after fertilization. At that point, the tiny ball of cells is no bigger than a raspberry, but its impact on the body can be mighty. Within a few weeks of the transfer, I experienced the first wash of nausea. I saw blood when I went to the bathroom and feared that it — whatever it was at that stage — was gone. But it decided to stay, and as the pregnancy progressed, I read headlines about a Texas woman justifying driving in the H.O.V. lane because she was pregnant and a tax break in Georgia for unborn children.
In the years since Dobbs, state after state banned abortions, and referendum after referendum enshrined abortion rights. Fertility patients in states like Texas and Tennessee worried about the legal status of their treatments, as anti-abortion politicians insisted that life began at conception. In February 2024 an Alabama court ruled that frozen embryos in an I.V.F. clinic were children, their destruction valid grounds for a wrongful-death claim. Until this decision, attempts to cement the links between abortion and embryonic personhood had largely ignored I.V.F., since it is widely perceived as a tool to create, rather than destroy, “potential life.” But this was a blunt assertion of full legal personhood for these little bundles of possibility that exist, as one scholar has put it, “at the borders of science, morality and democracy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/01/opinion/human-embryo-experiments-timeline.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9k4.TX2U.1mlvwLB3ZMCb&smid=url-share
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