Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, the Supreme Court of Alabama rules that frozen embryos are children.

Joanne Rosen is a lawyer who studies reproductive health and a practice professor at the Johns Hopkins

Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She joins Dr. Sharfstein to talk about the case that led to this ruling and what it means

for IVF treatment and beyond.

Let's listen. Joanne Rosen, thank you for returning to

public health on call. Today we're going to talk about this court case in Alabama. Can you tell me

about it? Sure. It was released just last Friday, February 16th. I'll start with the facts if that's okay with you.

That's where I always start with my students. What are the facts of the case? And these are

pretty bizarre facts. So the plaintiffs in this case are three couples who all underwent IVF

treatment at this fertility clinic in Alabama.

And through the IVF treatment that they received, they were all actually able to become

pregnant and they gave birth, quite fortunately, to healthy babies.

But they also, as a result of the IVF treatments, produced a number of additional embryos,

and this is quite common. It's actually standard procedure in an IVF cycle, and those additional

embryos that were not used as part of the IVF cycles were then frozen, and they are preserved or banked by the fertility clinic.

And the presumption is that the couples could come back at some later time and have another

...