Birmingham, Alabama - February 8, 2020: University of Alabama at Birmingham UAB Hospital title and logo on brick facade.

The Beginning of a Bad TRIP – Alabama’s Embryonic Personhood Decision and Targeted Restrictions on IVF Provision

By Katherine L. Kraschel

Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court called frozen embryos created via in vitro fertilization (IVF) “extrauterine children” and referred to the cryotanks where they are stored as  “cryogenic nurser(ies).” The Court sided with couples who claim the accidental destruction of frozen embryos created through IVF and cryopreserved ought to be treated equally to the death of a child. 

The case, LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, involves plaintiffs seeking punitive damages from an Alabama fertility clinic for the “wrongful death” of their embryos that were destroyed when a patient in the hospital where they were stored removed them from the cryotank. While the lower Alabama Courts concluded that the cryopreserved embryos were not a person or child under the state’s law, the Alabama Supreme Court disagreed and held that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” and that the  plaintiff’s wrongful death claims could proceed. 

Thoughtful scholars have argued that existing state laws do not sufficiently redress mistakes and accidents that occur in the process of fertility care, pregnancy, and birth. However, the ends do not justify the means in this case; likening frozen embryos to children is not a legally sound mechanism to hold fertility clinics accountable for negligently storing embryos. It illustrates how sympathetic stories can be used to further the agendas of those who seek to equate embryos and fetuses  to “people” under the law and undercut the critical role modern fertility care plays in (re)defining the bonds that create families, and particularly, many LGBTQ+ and single parent families. 

Specifically, lawmaking in fertility care stands to fuel the movement to create fetal personhood rights and a federal abortion ban. It may also signify an inflection point in regulating assisted reproduction reminiscent of pre-Dobbs targeted restrictions on abortion provider (TRAP) laws that sought to limit abortion provision by imposing restrictions. TRAP laws’ new sibling – targeted restrictions on IVF Provision – or TRIP laws, as I call them, stand to rob patients of their ability to build their families by compelling physicians to provide less effective, more expensive care. TRIP laws will erect barriers and exacerbate long standing racial disparities in accessing fertility care, and they will disproportionately impact members of the LGBTQ+ community who wish to build families through fertility treatments.  The Alabama decision is severe, but it should serve as a warning to state legislators with a new responsibility to safeguard reproductive health care without the floor of Roe’s protections – proceed with extreme care and regard for “unintended” consequences of regulating fertility care.  Read More

Health insurance application form with money, calculator, and stethoscope.

Going Public – The Future of ART Access Post-Dobbs

By Katherine Kraschel

The loss in Dobbs and the bleak outlook for abortion rights within the federal courts may afford advocates a unique opportunity to fully adopt a reproductive justice framework and apply it to access to fertility care, as other contributors to this symposium have argued.

This article outlines specific strategies for blue states eager to stake a claim in the reproductive justice movement to consider.

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WASHINGTON, DC - OCT. 8, 2019: Rally for LGBTQ rights outside Supreme Court as Justices hear oral arguments in three cases dealing with discrimination in the workplace because of sexual orientation.

The Many Harms of State Bills Blocking Youth Access to Gender-Affirming Care

By Chloe Reichel

State legislation blocking trans youth from accessing gender-affirming care puts kids at risk, thwarts physician autonomy, and potentially violates a number of federal laws, write Jack L. Turban, Katherine L. Kraschel, and I. Glenn Cohen in a viewpoint published today in JAMA.

So far this year, 15 states have proposed bills that would limit access to gender-affirming care. One of these bills, Arkansas’ HB1570/SB347, already has become law.

This legislative trend should be troubling to all, explained Cohen, Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. In an email interview, he highlighted “how exceptionally restrictive these proposed laws are,” adding that they are “out of step with usual medical, ethical, and legal rules regarding discretion of the medical profession and space for parental decision-making.”

Turban, child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine also offered further insight as to the medical and legal concerns these bills raise over email.

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Young male doctor in telehealth concept

Call for Abstracts: Looking Forward to a Post-Pandemic Landscape

By Carmel Shachar and Katie Kraschel

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted virtually every facet of day-to-day life.

This disruption has forced us to examine baseline choices and assumptions about how to deliver health care, participate in public discourse, provide access to education, and support the workforce. This “great revision” will continue in several iterative stages: an immediate response to the crisis, a modulation as the pandemic continues, and a resolution into a “new normal.”

The Petrie-Flom Center and the Solomon Center for Health Law Policy are interested in tracking when crisis settles into the new normal and articulating how public policy and law should respond to that evolution.

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Asking the Right Right Question About Football – Why do Some NFL Players Abuse Their Partners?

The national press is buzzing after TMZ released a video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice’s barbaric assault of his then-fiancee, Janay Rice.  Much of the spotlight of the coverage shined on the NFL’s handling of the abuse, and perhaps even more time was spent yesterday questioning Ms. Rice’s decision to stay in her relationship with her husband.  These are certainly valid questions to ask, and there is something to be said about the raised “awareness” of domestic violence in the aftermath of its players deplorable acts of violence.  I would argue the discussion has been more valuable than any awareness raised by NFL teams wearing pink during breast cancer awareness month.

If we want to best-capitalize on the awareness raised by these acts of violence, however, the conversation needs to shift from harm reduction (“why did she stay?”) to harm prevention.  To illustrate: when faced with the prevalence of lung cancer, do we ask “Why does the cancer patient continue to smoke?”  Yes, to some extent, we do, but we first addressed the causal inquiry, “What causes cancer?”, and in order to prevent the next generation from becoming addicted to nicotine, millions have been invested and continue to be invested in educating the public (and particularly youth) about the harms of tobacco use, and legislative action has been taken to prevent the harms caused by tobacco use.

Domestic violence (or intimate partner violence), like lung cancer, is a public health issue.  This is not a novel or controversial statement.  According to a 2010 CDC report, one in four women and one in seven men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner, and according to a 2003 report, the national costs of health services for intimate partner rape, physical assault, and stalking is nearly $4.1 billion.  The CDC’s website states:  “The goal is to stop IPV [intimate partner violence] before it begins. There is a lot to learn about how to prevent IPV.”

It is time that the health care community take the CDC’s statement seriously and work collaboratively across law, public health, and medicine to research, propose, and implement innovative solutions to this perpetual epidemic, that costs thousands of lives in the United States each year.  Unlike some other organizations aimed at addressing public health issues, organizations whose goal is to prevent domestic violence are often grossly under-funded.  Perhaps the most apropos inquiry or statement to put to the NFL, the NFL Player’s Union, or other public health institutions that agree that domestic violence prevention is important is one capture by a classic football film: “SHOW ME THE MONEY.”

[Ed. Note: This post reflects the author’s views only.  It does not necessarily represent the views of the Petrie-Flom Center or the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University.]

Limits on the Physician as a Good Samaritan

As one partner at my firm puts it, “If it makes good business sense, in the health care business, it’s probably illegal.” As a practicing junior health care attorney it did not take long for me to learn this reality of the regulatory scheme I learned as a law student.   As snarky as the sentiment may seem, the restrictions on profit-sharing, referrals, and reduced-cost or free goods and services imposed by Stark and Anti-Kickback laws (while well-intended) can stifle some creative thinking in health care delivery.

What is not always as salient in the daily grind of my practice focusing on transactions and system-level compliance issues, are the ways in which the regulatory scheme can limit a physician’s acts of generosity and kindness.  Whether we think our regulations intended to align incentives with cost-effective and quality health care delivery are good, bad or otherwise, I found this article in the New York Times by Abigail Zuger to be a thought-provoking moment of pause to consider how the complex scheme plays out in the day-to-day delivery of primary care and the physician-patient relationship.

Binders of Women? Reflections on ASRM Annual Meeting Round 2

by Katie Kraschel

Mitt Romney’s anecdote about the binders of women he relied upon in selecting members of his cabinet when he was Governor has fueled criticism from feminist groups and filled my Facebook feed with a plethora of Halloween pictures featuring costumes depicting his unfortunate choice of words.  People generally have an instinctive aversion to being summarized into a page in a loosely bound, plastic-covered book.  However, this level of summary and (arguably) downright objectification happens every day when individuals peruse  IVF clinic and cryobank catalogs shopping for sperm or eggs.  And while many of us worry that a Romney win next week would result in four years of presidential leadership that is clueless and insensitive to the plight of women in the workforce, the ASRM decision to remove the experimental label from oocyte cryopreservation is likely to literally increase the number of “women in binders,” which presents a different set of concerns.

Oocyte retrieval — the process of harvesting eggs that allows a woman to place her age, weight, height, eye color, S.A.T. score, college major, baby picture and perhaps even celebrity look-a-like into a gamete catalog — has long been a topic of bioethical debate and criticism due to the risks associated with the high level of hormones involved in the process and the accompanying high level of compensation frequently offered for women’s eggs.  The likely increases in demand and number of oocytes produced presents a unique opportunity to revisit these issues and reconsider what regulations may be necessary to keep all parties involved respected and protected.

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Would you rather medical school train your PCP to have good hands or a good bedside manner?

Last week NPR covered a story highlighting how medical education is morphing in order to adapt to the unmet demand for primary care physicians driven (at least in part) by the increased access to primary care that will be ushered in under the ACA.  It may be surprising to some to learn that many of the most prestigious medical schools like Johns Hopkins and Harvard do not have a primary care program; however, as reported by NPR, medical schools may soon rethink this hole in their curriculum in the face of changing demands upon the health care system and its accompanying incentives for young physicians to enter primary care.   Mount Sinai School of Medicine is leading the way in this regard by launching a new department of family medicine in June.

Intuitively, changing the medical education system to produce more primary care physicians will further goals of the ACA by increasing access to primary care, and therefore improving overall public health and diminishing cost by decreasing emergency room care for conditions that could have been treated less expensively or avoided altogether by increasing access to preventative services.  These are the arguments we’ve heard repeatedly by the champions of the ACA and by the Obama administration, particularly through its vision for the Prevention and Public Health Fund which was intended to bolster the pipeline of primary care physicians before being gutted earlier this year.

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