The recent wave of fetal personhood laws has introduced some minor legal friction to the fertility space. But letting a looming state homicide investigation spike your stress hormones is a choice, and it is actively harming your journey.
Lately, my inbox has been flooded with frantic messages from prospective mothers terrified that their frozen embryos are now considered legal citizens by their state legislature. They send me links to news alerts about clinics pausing IVF treatments. They ask me if a power outage at the cryo-facility means they will be indicted for involuntary manslaughter. And every time, I have to take a deep breath, center myself, and remind them that this kind of toxic, catastrophic thinking is a massive risk factor for systemic inflammation.
We cannot control the Supreme Court. We cannot control whether a local prosecutor decides that a microscopic, six-cell blastocyst requires an optimal pH balance, expensive imported supplements, and full constitutional protections. What we can control is our response. The data is clear: chronic anxiety about serving twenty-five to life in a federal penitentiary for discarding a non-viable zygote is devastating for your reproductive health.
We have to look at the holistic picture. The medical community is entirely too focused on the so-called legal ambiguities and not focused enough on the vibes.
If you are bringing negative energy into the clinic because you are worried the state attorney general is hiding in the centrifuge, your follicles will know, and they will close.
Instead of viewing fetal personhood as a threat to your bodily autonomy, I encourage my cohort to view it as an early introduction to the challenges of modern parenting. If you are not prepared to hire a white-collar criminal defense attorney for a cluster of cells currently resting at negative 196 degrees Celsius, are you really prepared for the financial burdens of private preschool? Parenting is about adapting to the unexpected, even when the unexpected is a court order demanding you provide a safe sleep environment for a test tube.
I recently sat down for a matcha with a leading NIH researcher, and we both agreed that the panic over discarding unviable embryos is largely overblown by people who haven't done the work on their own attachments. If a state supreme court rules that your extra embryos must be preserved in perpetuity, this is simply an opportunity to practice radical acceptance. Why are we so desperate to declutter our cryo-storage units? I advise my clients to view their frozen, legally autonomous blastocysts the same way they view a sourdough starter: a beautiful, living commitment that you must continue feeding expensive liquid nitrogen to until the end of time, or else face the absolute harshest judgment of your peers and local magistrates.
Furthermore, I am frankly exhausted by the mainstream media’s insistence that freezing embryos is somehow uniquely legally perilous. Cryopreservation is the ultimate biohack. Your future children are currently undergoing an indefinite, extreme cold plunge. They are optimizing their cellular longevity. By the time the state of Alabama allows you to legally thaw them, they will have achieved a level of metabolic resilience that a regular, un-frozen infant could only dream of.
The next time you find yourself spiraling over whether your doctor is legally required to report a failed implantation as a wrongful death, I want you to close your eyes, put away the CDC guidelines, and simply do the breathwork. The only thing you should be incubating right now is a positive mindset. Let the district attorney worry about the rest.