She needs a surrogate to have a baby. After Alabama’s IVF ruling, her embryo transfer was canceled

Meghan Cole was looking forward to Friday this week because her surrogate was finally scheduled for an embryo transfer. But Wednesday evening, 48 hours before the procedure was set to take place, Cole received some “devastating” news after emailing her doctor, she said.

The Alabama Supreme Court had ruled a few days prior, on Feb. 16, that embryos are considered human beings, leaving IVF clinics in the state scrambling to figure out whether they could face legal penalties for discarding embryos, NBC News reported.

“(My doctor) called me like 20 minutes later and said, ‘It’s canceled. We had meetings with lawyers all day. We can’t move forward knowing that we might be open to some sort of liability or criminal prosecution if something were to happen to the embryo before it’s transferred,’” Meghan Cole, an attorney in Birmingham, recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll sign a release. I am not going to sue you. I just want this to move forward.’ And obviously, she felt terrible. It’s out of her control.”

Already, the ruling has halted some IVF procedures across the state.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham has stopped all IVF treatments for the time being. In a statement, UAB spokesperson Hannah Echols said: “We are saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments.”

Alabama Fertility, where Meghan Cole is a patient, also shared a statement on social media: “We have made the impossibly difficult decision to hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and embryologists. … We are working as hard as we can to alert our…