IVF will become costlier with insurance and storage expenses
Dr. Michelle Bayefsky recently wrote an article about the financial impacts Alabama's recent supreme court decision will have
Experts expect In Vitro Fertilization to become more expensive following the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision to grant personhood rights to embryos that haven’t been implanted.
IVF clinics must purchase costlier insurance to cover legal costs if a petri dish is dropped. Storage costs will also increase as parents will no longer be allowed to destroy their embryos. Currently, it costs $1,000 a year to store them.
Dr. Michelle Bayefsky, an obstetrics and gynecology resident at NYU Langone Health who wrote about the decision for the Journal of the American Medical Association, said it will become a more significant problem.
“There aren't a ton of people doing IVF right now,” Bayefsky said. “So it's not necessarily a short-term problem, but it's clearly not a reasonable long term solution to just store all embryos forever. But that doesn't seem like a like a good use of resources. And it will take up a lot of resources as time goes on.”
Bayefsky said there is no in-between permitting IVF and establishing embryonic personhood. Alabama’s state legislature still hasn’t clarified whether it should be treated as a living child. They left many questions unanswered. Can people create and store more embryos than they plan to have necessarily? Can they deliberately destroy embryos at all?
“Rather than just putting a bandaid on the decision, we need to really reject the logic behind it,” Bayefsky said.
People could be affected indirectly if their embryos are stored in IVF-restrictive states.
“It's not necessarily as simple as just that it only impacts people exactly where the law has passed,” Bayefsky said.
It will also impact the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence and IVF. AI would help IVF professionals individualize treatment to make it more effective based on a person's medical conditions. It could better predict which type of fertility treatment would work best. Currently, they put patients into groups by age.
Artificial intelligence is the most advanced in embryo selection. IVF providers are, in many situations, arbitrary when selecting an embryo. They look at images from time-lapse machines to decide. An AI machine could consider much more, including a patient's age, weight, and prior obstetrical history.
The legal limits placed on IVF generally would hamper medical evolution and development in that regard because it would proscribe criminal penalties for someone who destroyed an embryo accidentally or intentionally.
The decision will also affect genetic testing protocols for embryos. The patient may want to use screening to avoid passing on a heritable disorder or because they may be old enough for there to be a risk of having the wrong number of chromosomes.
“IVF is really, to a large extent, a numbers game that takes a lot of eggs to get enough embryos,” Bayefsky said. “It takes about as many embryos as a couple can get.”