Brian Lear on W.N.C. and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand joins us now as she does once a month.

And the biggest news from her office right now is that Senator Gillibrand has just introduced a bill responding to the Alabama Supreme Court decision

declaring a frozen embryo to be a child under the law.

One result of the ruling already in Alabama is that in vitro fertilization clinics in that state,

as you've no doubt heard, have stopped serving patients trying to get pregnant.

And that could happen nationwide, depending on how this goes.

Senator Gillibrand's bill would establish a woman's right under federal law to access IVF and

other assisted reproductive technology, so let's find out more.

Senator always good of you to come on and answer questions every month. Welcome back to

WNYC.

Thanks, Brian. Tell us about your bell. So as you said, it would create a federal law preempting state and local laws that are intentionally restricting access to assisted reproductive technology.

That includes IVF, it includes other reproductive care,

and it establishes an individual right to access this kind of care and protects a medical provider to be able to provide it and safeguards and insurance carriers right to cover it.

So it's pretty much a protection so that if families want to access IVF and other types of technology

that helps and assist with reproduction that they have access to it.

And it's a widely supported bill, dozens of co-sponsors, including a Republican in the House.

Can you do a little IVF 101 and explain why if the point of IVF in vitro

fertilization is to implant an embryo for a pregnancy that some embryos also get destroyed in the process?

Yeah, so the way doctors like to do IVF is they typically like to have several embryos in the hopes that

one matures into an infant. And so for a lot of families that have done IVF, they still have

embryos being stored and

under this law in Alabama it declares all of those embryos as children and

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