Rep. Karla Rose Hanson, D-Fargo, right, speaks Oct. 28, 2024, about bills she plans to introduce on reproductive rights during a news conference in Fargo. (Jeff Beach/North Dakota Monitor)
(Jeff Beach – North Dakota Monitor) – A Fargo Democrat says she will be giving Republican lawmakers the opportunity to vote on bills protecting in vitro fertilization and birth control in North Dakota.
“For far-right politicians who insist that they won’t ever come after IVF or contraception, this upcoming legislative session will give them the chance to prove it by supporting these two common-sense bills,” state Rep. Karla Rose Hanson said Monday at a press conference in Fargo.
One bill specifies protecting contraception, the other, in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments. The bills include provisions protecting health care providers that provide birth control and fertility treatments.
Hanson said she fears that there will be legislation in the 2025 session targeting IVF as an extension of North Dakota’s strict anti-abortion law passed in 2023.
“I am hearing widespread concern that far-right legislators in North Dakota will take the next step and limit other types of reproductive health care, from birth control to infertility care,” Hanson said. “Some anti-abortion groups have called for IVF to be banned because they believe that life begins at the moment of fertilization, and that discarding embryos that aren’t implanted should be a crime.”
State Sen. Janne Myrdal, R-Edinburg, was a sponsor of North Dakota’s 2023 anti-abortion bill, which a court last month declared unconstitutional and vacated, though the state is appealing.
She said she hasn’t seen the draft legislation but she said a law protecting in vitro fertilization is unnecessary.
“IVF has never been at risk and never will be at risk in North Dakota,” Myrdal said in an interview after the press conference. “It’s been a fear tactic of the abortion industry for a long time that we will get into birth control and IVF and be in people’s bedrooms.”
2014 statewide measure placed on the ballot by the Republican-controlled Legislature “that would have enshrined the concept of fetal personhood into our state constitution.”
Hanson said the personhood movement says that life begins at conception as a way to ban abortion, but that it also makes IVF impossible.
The North Dakota measure was easily defeated but she said she sees the need for a law because of instances like the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos created through the IVF are considered children.
“It had the consequence of halting the practice of IVF treatment in the state of Alabama,” Hanson said.
Hanson was joined at the press conference by parents who have used IVF and health care providers.
Hanson said the North Dakota Medical Association and the North Dakota chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have endorsed both bills.
Among the other speakers was Shauna Erickson-Abou Zahr, who was diagnosed with cancer before she had started a family.
She and her husband used IVF because her cancer treatment put her at risk of infertility. Knowing that she had a viable embryo — which, after treatment, became her daughter — gave her strength, she said.
“She was truly what got me through cancer treatment, losing clumps of my hair, intensive treatments, the despair and grief over cancer, derailing my life and my hopes and my dreams,” Erickson-Abou Zahr said. “Imagining her in my arms gave me a reason to live, fight and have hope through the uncertainty.”
Hanson, who has no Republican opponent in the general election for the District 44 House, plans to introduce the bills when the Legislature convenes in January.
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