When she was 29, Jennifer and her boyfriend of two years weren’t ready to get married. So he proposed an alternative: freezing embryos together to cement their bond. They would split the $20,000 cost. “It was a symbol of how committed he was to me,” Jennifer thought. She said “yes.”
But for many couples, fertility preservation is now a standard part of building a future. Today, with more people meeting later in life or delaying child-rearing, embryo freezing has become a popular option as both an “insurance policy” and a symbol of commitment. But it also puts women’s bodies, choices, and freedom at inordinate risk — particularly as a recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling
Mallory hired an attorney, who went back and forth with her ex’s for 16 months before ending in mediation and a six-figure bill. She showed me two moving boxes filled with court documents. “You need to think about all of the choices,” Mallory said, “and what those choices mean if things go south.” Even the benefit of creating embryos may be overstated. When Royster tells patients that fresh eggs work twice as well as thawed ones, he’s citing a study that includes eggs frozen as early as 2005, using primitive methods. Recent improvements in vitrification techniques have ledAt Royster’s clinic and most others, the question about what to do if a couple separates is contained in a single form, buried among medical consents, explanations of risk, and surgical protocols.
Michele Goodwin, a professor of reproductive law at Georgetown University, described the Alabama ruling as “a potential living nightmare” that could lead not only to wrongful-death cases for destroying or damaging embryos but also to forced implantation. “The next step in this kind of logic is that embryos must have a place where they implant and fertilize” as part of their “right to life.”