An anti-abortion group last month sued seven Utah fertility clinics, claiming their disposal of embryos as part of the in vitro fertilization process violates the state’s wrongful death law.

The ministry Voice for the Voiceless believes it has a strong case because Utah is one of four states—Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri are the others—that have both a “fetal personhood” law and a civil wrongful death law that, the group contends, might apply to frozen embryos.

Other states offer opportunity for similar lawsuits: At least ten have either a fetal “personhood” law—giving a fetus, embryo, or fertilized egg the same legal rights as a person who has been born—or a wrongful death statute that might include frozen embryos, according to Pregnancy Justice, a group that tracks the issue and advocates for the rights of pregnant women, including the right to abortion.

“There’s a number of states that have laws like Utah’s that find that a person exists at a certain point, and that is conception,” said Frank Mylar, the attorney representing Voice for the Voiceless. He also represents another plaintiff, an anonymous woman from Ogden, Utah, who alleges in the lawsuit that she underwent an IVF procedure at one of the seven fertility clinics and was not informed that unused embryos would be discarded or about options to put her embryos up for adoption.

“Once that egg is fertilized, it actually at that point becomes a human being that’s entitled to rights,” Mylar said in an interview. “So every state that has that as a law, what we’re doing in this lawsuit would be very much applicable.”

The lawsuit illustrates the divide among many in the anti-abortion movement. Followers of a conservative philosophy known as “pronatalism” believe it’s imperative for Americans to have more babies. They want easier access to IVF, and President Donald Trump campaigned on making IVF more affordable.

So far, he has negotiated steep discounts on three IVF drugs and proposed allowing employers to provide separate health insurance coverage for fertility benefits, including lab tests, medications, genetic testing, and IVF.

But the IVF process often involves discarding embryos, creating a conundrum for people who support IVF but believe that life begins at fertilization and oppose abortion. For anti-abortion purists, those embryos are unborn children, so disposing of them is no different from abortion.

The split on the political right drew attention in February 2024, when the........

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