A February 2024 ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court, enabled in part by the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the U.S., allowed three couples to sue a fertility clinic over the accidental destruction of their frozen embryos under a wrongful death law. The effect of the ruling, at least as it applied to one state law, was to give those embryos the status of personhood. As described on NPR, the ruling "immediately raised concerns about in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state."
That's because IVF, a procedure in which eggs are fertilized outside the womb under laboratory conditions before a viable embryo is implanted back into the mother, usually creates more embryos than end up being used. As a result, the destruction of potentially viable embryos likely occurs — an act that could potentially now be considered criminal in Alabama, as explained by Vox:
In IVF, patients often create more fertilized embryos than they intend to use — some embryos may be genetically unviable, while others may result in a miscarriage for unknown reasons. Unused embryos may be stored for a time, but storage is expensive and typically paid for by patients — eventually, embryos are often donated for medical research or destroyed.
Granting legal personhood to embryos could force patients to pay for storage indefinitely or leave clinics liable to criminal prosecution if embryos are accidentally damaged. Such concerns have already led Alabama fertility clinics to pause IVF treatments.
These developments led some on social media to recall that former Vice President Mike Pence, a strongly anti-abortion politician, had publicly supported legal protections for IVF, at least in part because he and his wife had actually used the procedure in the past:
It is true that Mike Pence publicly supports fertility procedures including IVF, and also that the former second couple has personal experience with the procedure. In his 2022 book "So Help Me God," Pence wrote:
After nearly six years of unexplained infertility I had honestly all but given up hope that we would ever have children. But Karen never gave up. She endured multiple IVF and GIFT procedures in an effort to become pregnant with one disappointment after another.
Gamete Intra-Fallopian Transfer (GIFT) is an alternative to IVF that does not produce additional embryos that has the support of some elements of the anti-abortion movement. According to the former vice president, the couple attempted both GIFT and traditional IVF.
Despite claims made in some viral posts, however, neither of them have stated that any of these procedures were successful. Snopes' attempt to reach the Pences via a former spokesperson was unsuccessful.
Both Mike and Karen Pence have strongly implied, however, that their experience with fertility procedures was ultimately unsuccessful, and that their children came as the couple had all but given up hope. In a 2017 interview with The Federalist, the then-second lady said:
We went through a lot of procedures, we went through a lot of struggles with it, and a lot of money, and our doctor just kept saying, "I really don't know why you're not having kids. I don't know why you're not." And then finally, it just happened. [...] So, for us, it was really a matter of just letting God bring us kids when He was ready to bring us kids, and that's where they come from, and so we just had to wait until He was ready.
Both Mike and Karen Pence have stated that they had just turned to adoption by the time their first child was conceived. In "So Help Me God," the former Vice President wrote:
It was a miracle. Months earlier, we had submitted our names to an adoption agency, and shortly after we learned that Karen was expecting, we got the call that a young girl facing an unexpected pregnancy had chosen us. [...] When we learned that the family she had listed as her second choice for the adoption was clinically infertile, we withdrew, not wanting to deprive another couple of the joy of parenthood.
Speaking to CBS News in 2022, Pence explicitly stated fertility procedures should be protected by law. "I fully support fertility treatments and I think they deserve the protection of the law," he said. "They gave us great comfort in those long and challenging years that we struggled with infertility in our marriage."
Because Mike and Karen Pence have publicly stated that the couple used fertility procedures including IVF, we rate the claim as "True."