When Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., blocked a vote on congressional Democrats’ radical assisted reproductive technology bill at the end of February, she cited Louisiana as an example of a state with “common-sense” in vitro fertilization restrictions. Those little protections the 1986 law provided to unborn life, however, are subject to change now that the state House has advanced two bills aimed at shielding fertility facilities that handle and store embryos from liability.
A coalition of Republican and Democrat legislators in Louisiana — egged on by corporate media and their fearmongering about the Alabama Supreme Court’s embryo ruling — advanced two bills this week that seek to overhaul the Pelican State’s 1986 law governing embryos.
The state’s current statute appears to offer embryos protections that other states don’t by classifying them as “human cells and human genetic material” that “will develop in utero into an unborn child.” The 1986 law Hyde-Smith praised as “common sense,” however, already fell short of the moral and ethical duties posited by the statewide recognition that life begins at conception because it did virtually nothing to stop the serial creation and destruction of embryos.
Loopholes in the 1986 law allow fertility facilities to destroy an embryo as long as it “fails to develop further over a thirty-six hour period,” is deemed nonviable, or is stored out of state, something a majority of Louisiana’s IVF industry opts to do.
The statute also does nothing to prevent ethically questionable procedures associated with IVF such as genetic testing, cryopreservation (which hurts an
