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Dr. Lora Shahine on How the Fall of Roe Impacts IVF and Reproductive Rights
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In this timely episode of the Fall of Roe podcast, Chris Charbonneau chats with Dr. Lora Shahine, a reproductive endocrinologist at Pacific NW Fertility and the host of the Baby or Bust podcast. As a doctor who deals with IVF treatments for those struggling to build families, Dr. Shahine is very familiar with the trigger laws that are making her practice all the more challenging, especially in red states. Misoprostol is the drug most commonly associated with abortion and is already being targeted by the government, despite being known as a wonder drug that solves a host of other reproductive issues. As a result of this political interference, the U.S. is currently seeing a mass exodus of doctors to blue states where they are able to work with embryos to the best of their capabilities.
Dr. Shahine goes on to discuss just how worried she is about the future of reproductive healthcare. Not only will medical training not be as inclusive, but proper care will become even more inaccessible. By waging a war on abortion and embryos, the government has targeted women with miscarriage trauma and families struggling to get pregnant just as much. That’s why Dr. Shahine has founded Doctors for Fertility to try to help people understand how IVF is currently practiced, and to help keep it that way. The goal is to increase access and take the best care of their patients. Dr. Shahine and Charbonneau close out the episode by talking about a potential silver lining here: the fall of Roe V. Wade is an opportunity to strengthen women’s rights once and for all. Don’t forget that women aren’t even explicitly mentioned in the Constitution after all, and moments like this remind us of all the work yet to be done.
The Finer Details of This Episode:
- Trigger laws impacting IVF
- Mass exodus of doctors
- Targeting misoprostol
- The future of medical training
- The pandemic burnout
- Miscarriage trauma
- IVF expenses
- Doctors for Fertility
- Opportunities moving forward
Quotes:
“I think I can provide a really important perspective that people have not thought of yet how these trigger laws and laws that are focused on protecting life at every stage could impact people who are trying to build their family with IVF.”
“Defining life and protecting life at fertilization means protecting an embryo, and as an IVF Doctor, we are working with embryos every single day as a way to build a family. So what this could mean is if those personhood bills do go into effect, someone else gets to decide whether we're hurting embryos; it's basically giving rights to embryos, like people. And so someone else can decide that it's not okay to freeze embryos, someone else can decide it's not okay to do genetic screening on embryos.”
“All of these changes could only increase costs and increase limits to something that is already far too limited.”
“There's so few people graduating from this field. Where are they going to want to practice? They're going to want to practice in states where they're able to practice medicine, that's the best for their patients. And there's going to be a mass exodus of doctors from states that are really limiting them.”
“According to the World Health Organization, one of the wonder drugs of the last 40 years, they have a list of drugs that have been the most life saving on the planet…And misoprostol is one of those listed because of its life saving properties in the care of women.”
“I do really worry about the, you know, medical deserts, right? Like places in the country where women just can't get reproductive care because nobody wants to practice there.”
“I can't tell you how many people picketing outside the clinic that then brought their daughters in. One guy said to me, ‘Well, she's only 14.' And I said, ‘Well, a lot of them are only 14, you know.’… So people find ways to justify what they do.”
“People who are struggling with infertility and with recurrent miscarriages are already feeling marginalized.”
"We have a grassroots effort that is going to launch officially next week. It's called Doctors for Fertility, and it's some reproductive endocrinologists, just like me, trying to come together to form a pack, try to get ahead of this, and really support our colleagues in different states that are not protected like I am.”
“We were trying to get contraception covered. And I said, 'Well, now that you're covering Viagra, surely it's clear to you why you'd need to cover contraception as well.’ And they were like, ‘Well, Viagra solves a medical problem, and pregnancy is not a medical problem’.”
“This is going to wake us up and help us change with something more permanent.”
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