(Georgia Recorder) – A bill aimed at enshrining the right to in-vitro fertilization into state law cleared its first hurdle Monday, passing a House committee with a unanimous vote.
“I feel great. That went very well,” said the bill’s sponsor, Statesboro Republican state Rep. Lehman Franklin after the vote. “I expected it to go well because this issue, from the feedback that I’ve gotten, is a bipartisan issue. Everybody seems to love it.”
In-vitro fertilization, or IVF, is a fertility treatment in which eggs are removed from a woman’s ovary, fertilized in a laboratory and then implanted into a uterus and allowed to develop, or frozen for potential later use.
Franklin said he and his wife are expecting a new daughter in June thanks to IVF, garnering smiles and thumbs up from committee members.
Parents of children conceived through IVF told the committee their stories, including the heartbreak of lost pregnancies and failed attempts to conceive. Mom of three Andrea Kerr said she thanks IVF and her medical team for her now happy and boisterous home.
“In-vitro fertilization is more than the scientific protocols, medications, appointments, and surgeries,” she said. “It’s finally being able to hang the extra Christmas stocking on the fireplace mantle after saving it for one day just in case. It’s decorating our nursery after the upstairs room sat dark and empty and cold for years. It’s teaching my kids how to ride a bike. It’s watching them barrel down the stairs on Christmas morning. It’s cheering them on at their little league baseball games. It’s singing happy birthday over a cake and watching your first born child blow out his candles.”
The procedure is now legal in Georgia, but enshrining it in the law could help calm the nerves of providers, patients and advocates.
During IVF, doctors typically gather and fertilize multiple eggs, and embryos that are not selected can be donated for research or allowed to thaw out and be destroyed, which some anti-abortion advocates say is philosophically equivalent to murder.
Georgia’s abortion law, which went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections in 2022, extends the definition of personhood to include unborn children, which led some to fear the state would go after IVF clinics that allow fertilized eggs to be destroyed.
Those fears were further stoked last year when an Alabama Supreme Court decision defined frozen embryos as children, temporarily shutting down clinics until the state Legislature passed a law to protect the clinics.
The bill’s odds look relatively good. It has bipartisan support, and House Speaker Jon Burns said protecting IVF would be one of his top priorities this year. But a bill is not a law until it gets the governor’s signature, and there’s always room for the unexpected.
Before this bill can become the law in Georgia, it will need to pass the full House. The deadline for that to happen easily is March 6, Crossover Day. After that, it will need to pass the Senate before the end of the session, April 4.
Franklin said he feels optimistic about his bill’s chances.
“If there’s any debates or anything that anybody wants to talk about, I’m more than happy to sit down with them and have those discussions and talk to anybody at any time, but the reality is the issue is pretty clear, and the bill is very clear, so there’s really not a lot of depth to go into there other than the human side of the issue,” he said.
