The Alabama IVF decision.
Poor women have always been denied.
The Alabama Supreme Court has made the outlandish decision that frozen embryos are human beings.
It is so outrageous that even the likes of Trump have tried to distance themselves from the court’s ruling.
Of course, what he and the others in the MAGA world are concerned about is what this decision will cost them at the ballot box.
Even most Republican voters oppose the decision of the Alabama justices.
But women’s access to reproductive care and fertility treatments didn’t just become an issue when the Alabama court ruled.
Uninsured women experiencing infertility reported fewer medical visits than insured women having issues getting pregnant (39 percent compared to 65 percent.) reports a 2019 article in Michigan Medicine.
For poor women seeking fertility care, America has always been Alabama.
Kaiser Health News reports on the case of Mary Delgado.
Mary Delgado’s first pregnancy went according to plan, but when she tried to get pregnant again seven years later, nothing happened. After 10 months, Delgado, now 34, and her partner, Joaquin Rodriguez, went to see an OB-GYN. Tests showed she had endometriosis, which was interfering with conception. Delgado’s only option, the doctor said, was in vitro fertilization.
“When she told me that, she broke me inside,” Delgado said, “because I knew it was so expensive.”
Delgado, who lives in New York City, is enrolled in Medicaid, the federal-state health program for low-income and disabled people. The roughly $20,000 price tag for a round of IVF would be a financial stretch for lots of people, but for someone on Medicaid — for which the maximum annual income for a two-person household in New York is just over $26,000 — the treatment can be unattainable.
Expansions of work-based insurance plans to cover fertility treatments, including free egg freezing and unlimited IVF cycles, are often touted by large companies as a boon for their employees. But people with lower incomes, often minorities, are more likely to be covered by Medicaid or skimpier commercial plans with no such coverage. That raises the question of whether medical assistance to create a family is only for the well-to-do or people with generous benefit packages.
“In American health care, they don’t want the poor people to reproduce,” Delgado said. She was caring full-time for their son, who was born with a rare genetic disorder that required several surgeries before he was 5. Her partner, who works for a company that maintains the city’s yellow cabs, has an individual plan through the state insurance marketplace, but it does not include fertility coverage.
If any good comes from the terrible Alabama IVF decision it may be the attention it gives to the nation-wide denial of fertility care for poor people choosing to have a family using this procedure.
Writes the Georgetown Journal of Poverty and Law Policy:
If told that treatment for one of the most common diseases for people between the ages of twenty and forty-five costs several thousands of dollars, is usually not required to be covered by insurance companies in the United States, and is inaccessible to most low-income women, many Americans would be incredulous.
This, however, is the case!