Countries all over have started to see a trend in population decline as people wait longer to have children or decide to live child-free. Japan currently is facing a fertility rate of 1.26, one of the lowest rates in the world. The Japanese government plans to fix this by paying for in vitro fertilization, or IVF, treatments for women married to men. IVF is a method of reproduction tech where they collect embryos and fertilize them in a lab. Japanese public health insurance began paying back 70% of the cost of these fertility treatments in 2022. Currently, this 70% will only be given to married, heterosexual couples, so single women and those in same-sex marriages wouldn’t be able to receive this 70%. Even before the government put this policy in place, Japan saw a rise in IVF-related births in 2021, with about 70,000 babies being born through IVF. This means that one in every 11.6 babies born in Japan is born through some form of IVF.
Population Issues in the United States
On the other side of the world, the United States is also facing population issues, although not as bad as Japan’s. The Republican-dominated Alabama Supreme Court has been trying to deal with this problem by taking on a case around frozen embryos. On February 16th, 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos had the same rights as children. The court made this decision after a couple sued a fertility clinic and hospital because a patient at the hospital tried picking up the couple’s frozen embryos, burned themselves, and ended up dropping them. The embryos were destroyed and became unusable. While the Alabama Supreme Court felt they were protecting these frozen embryos and potentially encouraging more people to have children, the ruling backfired on them after many fertility clinics and hospitals stopped all IVF treatments until further notice.
Credit: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Legal and Ethical Questions
Doctors, clinics, and users of IVF have a lot of questions about what will happen if all these frozen embryos now legally have the same rights as children. Several embryos are collected and the ones unused are frozen and stored when using IVF. Will they have to be used in order to not be abandoned? If someone were to accidentally destroy these embryos, would they be charged with murder? No one has answered these questions yet, but it is definitely impacting those who have been waiting or in the process of trying to become pregnant through IVF in the state of Alabama.
Credit: Galina Fomina, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Implications for Birth Rates
This ruling and the overturning of Roe v Wade have raised concerns from fertility doctors, couples in family planning, and unmarried couples. Doctors are too afraid to give life-saving treatments out of fear of potentially breaking a law due to the broad wording of many abortion bans, and many people are too concerned about what this might mean if issues were to occur during pregnancy. Because of this, the US may have negatively impacted any efforts they had to increase the US’s birth rates. Japan’s approach could be a better example of how to deal with the current low birth rates.
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