Fertility Medicine After Roe
By Nairi Shirinian and Meghna Mukherjee,
Ms. Magazine
| 07. 13. 2022
It’s no coincidence that the world’s first IVF baby was born just five years after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. IVF, or in vitro fertilization, is often mistakenly thought to be irrelevant to abortion debates. After all, people spend tens of thousands of dollars on reproductive technologies like IVF to help them become pregnant, while the conversation surrounding abortion largely concerns unexpected and often unwanted pregnancies.
But, upon a closer look, Roe not only empowered millions of women with bodily autonomy by constitutionally protecting their right to terminate a pregnancy—the decision also enabled the rapid growth of new technologies beyond IVF to assist human reproduction.
With Roe reversed, several states are poised to ban abortions; trigger laws in at least 13 U.S. states will immediately prohibit abortion without exceptions. Under many of these state laws, ‘life’ will be defined as the moment an egg is fertilized. These laws threaten those undergoing (and those performing) procedures, such as IVF or third-party gamete donation, by limiting or prohibiting the freezing or discarding of embryos—a process fundamental to successful fertility treatments. Researchers...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...