INCIID has been warning about personhood for at least a decade — not because we were speculating, but because the legal groundwork was already visible if you knew where to look. North Dakota passed a personhood amendment back in 2014. Georgia and South Carolina had personhood bills on the table as early as 2009. This was never a sudden shift; it was a slow-moving legal architecture that most of the country only noticed once Alabama made it impossible to ignore.

We’ve been tracking it publicly for years. Back in 2022, as Dobbs was decided, we walked through specific personhood bills already on the books in Georgia, South Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, and Oklahoma, dating back to 2009 and 2012. We noted that Tennessee had already signed personhood language into law in 2021. We even mentioned something most organizations wouldn’t: since INCIID’s founding in 1995, we have periodically received hate mail accusing us of “playing God,” almost always rooted in the belief that IVF is morally equivalent to abortion. That belief is the seed from which the personhood law was built, and we’ve watched it move from the margins into statehouses over three decades.

In 2023, we went further and laid out exactly how personhood laws could endanger reproductive rights as a matter of policy, not just precedent. Months later, Alabama proved us right. And when the Southern Baptist Convention formally opposed IVF on personhood grounds, we said the ideological groundwork was already being built into a legislative agenda.

Now, physicians affiliated with the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) are saying the same thing — in the New England Journal of Medicine. It shouldn’t have taken this long for the medical establishment to say it out loud. But we’re glad they finally have.

What’s Actually New Here

The article, authored by ASRM members Christopher Moutos, John Phelps, and Dean Moutos, warns that a new generation of state bills — branded as fertility clinic “reporting” or “transparency” measures — are functioning as a quieter, harder-to-oppose vehicle for personhood-style restrictions. States including Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma have introduced legislation that would require clinics to report on private embryo-related decisions, potentially rewrite established medical definitions, and sideline the clinical judgment of trained reproductive endocrinologists.

This is the tactical shift patients need to understand: it is far easier to pass a bill called “transparency in fertility care” than one called “embryos are legal persons.” The effect on patients, however, can be the same.

ASRM’s Chief Advocacy & Policy Officer, Sean Tipton, put it plainly: these bills risk turning private medical decisions into political targets and making IVF harder for families who need it to access. The authors go further, warning that fear of embryo-disposition restrictions could push patients to transfer embryos prematurely or seek care in another state entirely — and could push physicians toward creating fewer embryos per cycle defensively, even when that means a less effective treatment protocol.

This Is Not Hypothetical Anymore — We Have the Precedent

Skeptics will say this is alarmist. It isn’t. We’ve already watched it happen.

When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic that frozen embryos could be treated as children under state law, IVF services in Alabama halted almost overnight. Patients mid-cycle didn’t know if their clinics would still be operating the next week. We covered this in real time in February 2024, and we said then what bears repeating now: this was never going to stay contained to one state. It was a preview.

The ideological infrastructure behind that ruling didn’t disappear — it organized. Just months later, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution opposing IVF outright, rooted in the same personhood framework that drove the Alabama decision. Around the same time, Project 2025’s policy language was described by legal experts as incompatible with IVF and with some forms of contraception. Nationally, roughly 85% of Americans oppose making IVF illegal — yet the legislative and judicial groundwork to restrict it has continued to advance anyway, often through channels the public never sees coming.

That’s exactly why the new “reporting bill” strategy matters. It’s the version of this fight that doesn’t make headlines until it’s already law.

The Criminalization Pattern Beyond IVF

Personhood-adjacent law doesn’t stop at fertility clinics. It has already been used to prosecute people for pregnancy outcomes that were never crimes before. Cases like those of Brittany Watts, Amari Marsh, and Selena Chandler-Scott — women investigated or charged in connection with miscarriages or stillbirths — illustrate how quickly “protecting embryos” can turn into surveilling pregnant people. Pregnancy Justice has documented over 200 such prosecutions in the years following Dobbs.

Internationally, Italy offers a cautionary long view: restrictive reproductive laws passed decades ago continue to constrain IVF access and embryo research today, long after the initial political moment that created them faded from the news cycle. Laws like this are easy to pass and extraordinarily hard to unwind.

The Constitutional Case Patients Should Know

Personhood laws are frequently rooted in a specific theological position — that human life and legal personhood begin at fertilization — applied as if it were a universal, secular medical consensus. It is neither. It is one belief among many, including many religious ones.

That distinction has real legal weight. Thomas Jefferson’s foundational framing of religious liberty was that a neighbor’s beliefs neither pick his pocket nor break his leg, and therefore government has no business enforcing them on others. Jewish plaintiffs have successfully argued in court that certain abortion and personhood-adjacent restrictions violate their own religious beliefs about when life begins and how reproductive decisions should be made — a reminder that “religious freedom” arguments cut in more than one direction. No single faith tradition’s doctrine should be written into law governing every patient’s medical care, regardless of their own beliefs.

What This Means for You Right Now

• If you’re in or considering treatment in Arkansas, Texas, or Oklahoma, ask your clinic directly whether pending legislation could affect embryo storage, disposition, or reporting requirements during your treatment window.
• If you have frozen embryos, understand your clinic’s and your state’s current legal posture before making disposition decisions, and don’t let political fear pressure you into a decision you’re not ready for.
• Everywhere: contact your state and federal representatives. Bills framed as “transparency” or “reporting” deserve the same scrutiny as bills explicitly labeled personhood measures — because, increasingly, they’re the same thing under different labels.

INCIID’s Position

We are not a partisan organization, and this is not a partisan issue for the people we serve. Infertility does not affect voter registration. The couples and individuals who rely on IVF to build their families span every faith, every political affiliation, and every part of this country.

What we are is consistent. We’ve been saying this for at least a decade — since personhood amendments first started appearing in state legislatures, long before most of the country connected them to IVF. We said it again in 2022 as Dobbs unfolded, pointing to bills that had already been quietly signed into law years earlier. We said it in 2023, laying out the danger as policy rather than precedent. We said it in 2024, when Alabama proved the theory correct, and the Southern Baptist Convention showed the ideological machinery behind it was organized and moving. Every one of those warnings has been borne out. The NEJM article is not new information to this community — it’s confirmation, from inside organized medicine itself, of a pattern INCIID has been tracking and naming since before most advocacy organizations were paying attention.

We will keep watching the “reporting bill” language as it spreads to other states, and we will keep telling you plainly what it means for your care, your privacy, and your right to make your own reproductive decisions.

If you have a personal story about how personhood legislation or fertility reporting requirements have affected your care, we want to hear it.