Patients With Cancer in Alabama 'Being Robbed of the Choice to Build a Family After Treatment'

In the aftermath of Alabama Supreme Court’s in vitro fertilization ruling, the state’s reproductive-age women with cancer, who face a high likelihood of future infertility, “are losing the standard-of-care option to build a family following their necessary medical treatments,” said Northwestern Medicine fertility preservation expert Dr. Kara Goldman.

“Reproductive-age patients with cancer have few effective options to preserve their future fertility, and it is unfathomable to take one such option away from this already vulnerable population,” said Goldman, an associate professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and director of fertility preservation at Northwestern Medicine. “A profound consequence of this ruling — a ruling based merely on religious belief and without scientific merit —is an unacceptably high risk of infertility for patients with cancer and other fertility-threatening conditions.”

Dr. Goldman is available for interviews with the media. Contact Kristin Samuelson at ksamuelson@northwestern.edu to schedule an interview.

Traveling across state lines for care is ‘unacceptable’

“Reproductive-aged people with cancer should be adequately counseled about the impacts of their treatment on fertility and offered fertility preservation as part of comprehensive cancer care, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine,” Goldman said. “For those suggesting that patients can merely travel across state lines to access fertility preservation care, or that patients can consider alternative methods of fertility preservation, these substitutes are both logistically and medically unacceptable.