The bill, which sat in the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs for seven months, was rushed to the Senate floor this week in light of a recent Alabama ruling involving vitro fertilization, which set off weeks of debate over IVF, pregnancy, and medical ethics.
Before the bill could be passed, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) objected to a unanimous consent and killed the measure.
Emma Waters, a bioethics researcher at The Heritage Foundation, tells AFN the bill known as the Veteran Families Health Services Act would further “under regulate” the IVF industry in the United States.
“What's so wild is we know that the egg and sperm donation industry thrives on very little regulation, and lots of money changes hands,” she advises.
The bill, if passed, would use taxpayers’ dollars to reimburse military members who purchase egg and sperm for a child. Any person would qualify, she says, including single people, same-sex couples, and transgenders.
Waters, who studied the bill, also noticed it grants the Department of Defense the right to perform research on leftover embryos, too. That provision in the bill violates federal law which prohibits federal funds from funding research that destroys human embryos.
