An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos were “unborn children.” Since then, at least four of Alabama’s seven fertility clinics have hired biotech companies to move the cells elsewhere. A fifth clinic is working with a doctor in New York to discard embryos because of concerns about the legality of doing so in Alabama.Fertility patients outside of Alabama, too, are worried about how their precious embryos — specks of 70 to 200 cells barely visible to the human eye — might one day be affected by lawmakers who believe human life begins at conception. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, 14 states have passed total or near total abortion bans. And the Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted in June to oppose I.V.F., calling for the protection of “frozen embryonic human beings.”That month in Texas, Diana Zucknick spent $1,550 to send a tank of liquid nitrogen holding five of her embryos to New York for safekeeping. In South Dakota, Jennifer Zabel destroyed two embryos because she feared the state would take control of them. And in Mississippi, Dr. Preston Parry said more of his fertility patients were choosing to make fewer embryos at a time, prolonging the typical I.V.F. process in order to minimize leftover embryos.While there is no official tally of the number of frozen embryos in the United States, experts estimate it’s in the millions. And many clinics are overwhelmed by a mounting inventory of cells that are sometimes years or even decades old.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The clinics are routinely sued by patients for errors that destroy embryos, as happened in Alabama. An effort to define them legally as “unborn children” has raised the stakes. To the fertility patients whose embryos were destroyed at an Alabama clinic, the circumstances must have been shocking. Somehow, a patient in the hospital housing the clinic had wandered into a storage room, pulled the embryos from a tank of liquid nitrogen, and then dropped them on the floor — probably because the tank was kept at -360 degrees.The bizarre incident was at the center of lawsuits filed by three families that eventually reached the Alabama Supreme Court. On Friday, a panel of judges ruled that the embryos destroyed at the clinic should be considered children under state law, a decision that sent shock waves through the fertility industry and raised urgent questions about how treatments could possibly proceed in the state.Yet the accident in the Alabama clinic echoes a pattern of serious errors that happen all too frequently during fertility treatment, a rapidly growing industry with little government oversight, experts say. From January 2009 through April 2019, patients brought more than 130 lawsuits over destroyed embryos, including cases where embryos were lost, mishandled or stored in freezer tanks that broke down.Those errors have taken on new gravity as the anti-abortion movement aims to extend “personhood” to fetuses and embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization, arguing that they are “unborn children” and bringing cases to an increasingly polarized judiciary open to considering the idea.“When things go wrong with I.V.F., it opens a window for this kind of strategy,” said Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University who has studied in vitro fertilization litigation. “To the extent that there is little regulation, it does provide an opportunity to promote the personhood agenda.”Denise Burke, senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which opposes abortion rights, called the Alabama decision “a tremendous victory for life” that protected “unborn children created through assisted reproductive technology.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.