FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Fight for Alabama Families Coalition Corinn O'Brien and Alabama Fertility's Mamie McLean - Jeff Poor Show - Wednesday 9-04-24
(upbeat music) - Thank you for staying with us on this Wednesday morning. You get off, boy, 'cause I'm going back to Alabama. As I stepped out of that Cadillac, I said, "Mr. Minifang's." He said, "You don't have to call me, Mr. Mr. Mr." ♪ The whole world called behind ♪ ♪ He said, "Drift a canyon, wiggle back to the Jet Force Show ♪ ♪ What if it talked about '06, '05? Thank you for staying with us on this Wednesday morning. Text line, still, if you want to get in two, five, one, three, four, three, zero, one, zero, six. That's how you get in touch with the program. So, look how new talk '93 won in Montgomery. Joey Clark gonna be with us in about an hour. And in two hours, my friend from up near Birmingham, trust me to be precise for the trustful tribute. Scott Butterm, so please stay tuned for that. But joining us now on the line, I have two guests from the Fight for Alabama Families Coalition, Corinne O'Brien, and from Alabama Fertility. Dr. Mamie McLean joins us on the line. Ladies, good morning. Thanks for coming on. - Thanks for having us. Good morning. - Thanks for having us so much. - Hey, yeah, thanks for coming on. Corinne, we'll start with you. Talk a little bit about this effort. The Fight for Alabama Families Coalition, what it is, and explain it a little bit to us if you could. - Yeah, absolutely. And I guess it makes sense, if it makes sense to kind of bring you through the story from the start. So I work at a nonprofit at the state level and education policy issues, but I'm also a current IVF patient. And so to kind of bring you back through how I landed at this point, over five years ago at this point, I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer. And it was when I was six months pregnant with my first daughter. And my mom and I were incredibly close. And that was an incredibly difficult loss to navigate. And I navigated as an only child. So I knew kind of through that experience that I really wanted my daughter to have a sibling to navigate life with after we were gone. So about three and a half years ago, my husband and I began trying for a second child and hit every bump in the road, began working with actually Dr. McLean. Dr. McLean's my doctor and has gone through at this point many IUI's and different fertility treatments. And now three rounds of IVF. But at the time that the Supreme Court decision came down that Friday, February 16th, I was actually six weeks pregnant from a successful embryo transfer in January. But that morning we got news that the transfer might not be successful. And then we got the news about the Supreme Court decision and we're pretty devastated. We didn't know what it would mean at that point, but knew it probably wasn't good. And then over the next couple of days, we saw clinics closing. And we were devastated thinking like we might lose this baby and we might not have access to IVF. So that Thursday after the decision came down, I woke up with this down with what I really feel like was divine kind of inspiration. I really believe it was my mom pushing me and saying, okay, Karen, like what's the plan? What are you going to do? Like, you know these legislators you work at the State House. Like what is the plan to work on this issue and to find a quick solution? So I put an email in a Google Doc and shared that with about 50 colleagues. And by the end of that day, we had no less than 50 people in that Google Docs sending emails. We were hearing that many emails were going out. And by the next week, we had what has now turned into the fight for Alabama Families Coalition. We had done to mobilize thousands of IVF families and not just the women that are going through it, their husbands and their grandparents, everyone who's impacted. We had over 350 people travel to the State House to tell their stories and to urge lawmakers to quick action. And because of that, we were able to get a bill passed in over, you know, five days, which we know is the quickest bill can pass in the State of Alabama. And over those weeks, we've sent over 33,000 emails, you know, motivating and asking legislators to take action. We're really grateful for the leadership of Senate Pro Tem Reed and Speaker Redbetter, of course, Senator Tim Nelson and Representative Terry Collins, who, you know, listened to our experiences and took quick action. And so just incredibly grateful for all that has happened. We still have a lot of work to do, but, you know, we were incredibly grateful that because of their quick action, we were able to get IVF services up and going again. - Hey, Corinne, and then this was kind of me watching from the outside looking in, but it looked like for a hot second that Alabama was going to lose IVF. And then I knew the legislature would ultimately intervene and try to do the right thing. But, you know, especially sitting down here mobile in this clinic and their litigation they had to deal with, you're a big city and you lose the service. I mean, it's a, I don't know if it's necessarily essential service, but you're not thought of. I mean, you know, professionals, a lot of people that use IVF looking around and they're saying, well, what I want to live there, what I want to work there and I want to have children, but I don't have access to an IVF clinic. I mean, I think that's a, that takes something away from your community. And people may disagree with the procedure or whatever, but if you don't have that service and you have to drive the Pensacola or Biloxi as it was looking like for a while here, I thought, well, that's gonna put mobile in particular behind the eight ball. - Yes, I mean, we absolutely agree. You know, one of the things that all of this is impacting real Alabama families who have dreams of expanding their family, having their first child or having more children and many people, you know, on those sides of the aisle, you know, we're incredibly worried about this. And I think some people still are, you know, we have this IVF immunity law that has passed, but it's been challenged as unconstitutional. And so, you know, I think we still have a lot of work to do to make sure there's full and permanent protection of IVF in our state. I would also add that, you know, we're hearing a lot of talk these days about people saying, I am pro IVF, but, you know, maybe there are some reasonable regulations we could think about for IVF. And we really want to push back on that. So, we know that there are real effects for some regulations that will affect Alabama families. If we're putting burdensome regulations in place, that could result in limiting access to IVF, vastly increasing the cost of IVF, something that is already very expensive, and also vastly increasing the amount of unnecessary rounds of medication and more treatment and ultimately more pain that families will have to go to, that women will have to go through. And so, we really want to push back on that talk about reasonable regulations. And many of the people who are discussing these don't have real world experience with the IVF process and won't be even impasted by these regulations. And we know that there are real Alabama families that will be affected by this, and that's the work that we're going to be doing in the months ahead. Dr. McLean, and I'll get you in here and kind of walk us through this. Now, my understanding and one of the criticisms as well, you're fertilizing way too many eggs, and that's creating whatever the ethical objection is and what to do with the embryos that aren't used. But my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that it's kind of like throwing darts at a dart board, and you don't know if you're gonna hit the bull's eye, but the more darts you have, the higher the likelihood. So like, how do you, I mean, like how much of an impediment would it be to try to streamline some of that or maybe limit the number of embryos so you don't at the end have these embryos that you have to figure out what to do with? - Yeah, that's a great question. We know that's a concern of a lot of folks out there, and I would say that, yeah, I'm not a dart player, and we, you know, physicians that practice my subspecial aid medicine, we get a four years of medical school. We do four years of OB/GYN training, then we do three additional years of subspecialty training. We go through two rounds of board certifications that's written in oral boards. So we are, you know, highly trained, and I would say highly motivated to help these families. So for any couple that's considering IVF treatments, they sit down with their physician in advance of beginning those treatments, and they talk about their history, their laboratory testing, their desired family size, and they make a decision with their physician about their IDF plan, and that absolutely includes how many embryo, or how many eggs do we need to fertilize? Because we do want to end up with the ideal number of embryos for them to have their ideal family size, and to your point, it is often challenging to predict, you know, I've got patients that have been through multiple rounds of IVF to achieve upwards of 50 eggs, and they get one embryo. So, you know, some of these reasonable regulations that are being proposed are limiting the number of eggs we could fertilize. That would absolutely limit success of IVF for so many families. It would lead to fewer babies born in our state. It would lead to more costly care for these patients to bear the burden of, and also more risk to patients, because they would have to go through more rounds of IVF. So, that is your question. I don't know that we're exactly throwing darts against the dart board, because we are using our clinical training and experience in each patient, you know, clinical history and testing to try to make these decisions, but each couple ultimately have the decision of how many eggs are fertilized, and we have some couples that feel very strongly that every embryo should be transferred. And so, for them, we will often limit fertilization to fewer number of eggs to try to help them achieve their family in a way that's a reasonable and safe to them. But then, suppose these regulations on all patients would absolutely be devastating to our practice of medicine in this state, and limit access to care. - Well, and here's something I'd like you to speak on a little bit, like, each round of IVF. It's not just like you could just wake up one day, decide, "I want to have IVF," and you show up at the clinic, and there it is. You do IVF, it's very time consuming, and there's multiple rounds of pharmaceuticals and injections, and it goes. I mean, you have to create the ideal scenario to achieve this, and that's where it gets cost prohibitive for a lot of people, especially the drugs you have to take, the medicines, and that it takes time, and you look at it, I mean, that's sort of the problem, right? Like, you just, it just doesn't happen. - Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right, and I would add to that that no patients want to IVF, right? Everyone who walks their door, they want to get pregnant without our health. You know, it just, it hasn't happened for them for one reason or another, and then the time is so important, and I did an embryo transfer on a couple last week, and I met them for the first time in February, you know, and here we are end of August, and it took us six months to get all the way through to embryo transfer, and that even is fast for some patients, you know? Others have been at this for years, and I think, you know, all fertility patients out there will appreciate just the impact of time and waiting and cycles, and so IVF is not undertaken lightly by anyone, and involves multiple tests and tips and frauds and ultrasounds and lab work, it involves expensive medications and can be a very expensive treatment, so this is not treatment that's taken lightly by anyone. - And to jump in there, just as a patient myself, you know, if you're doing IVF, this is at the end of a very long and painful road of you trying for many months, many years for many people to get pregnant, you know, before you get IVF, there's lots of treatments that Dr. McLean had our family go through, and IVF is the very last treatment on the table, you know, no one, I think there's a common misconception out there that people are doing IVF as an elective procedure, you know, this is the last option for many families, and it is a very painful invasive option, expensive, nobody wants to do IVF, just like Dr. McLean said, so I just wanted to add that there. - All right, according to that, we've got a hop along here on our add on to this, legislature 2025, the fix you have now is, you guys have now, well, not you guys, but the legislature has now is meant to be kind of temporary, what do you think it looks like in 2025 and beyond, or what, and then here's always the concern, and either one of you can address this, that there's always the threat, or the possibility of an overreach, where you shield yourself from some of the liability as a practitioner of IVF, and then something goes wrong, you're shielded by the Alabama legislature, or whatever laws enacted, so like, I don't think that's your aim at all, don't get me wrong, but that is one of the concerns is raised, like what's the good, happy medium here, to keep from being too many regulations versus not enough, I mean, what's the ideal scenario? - Yeah, I think what I would say is, you know, number one, ideally, we want to achieve full and permanent protection of IVF, and just like you mentioned, Jeff, the current law we have in place was a stopgap measure, it's what we could get across the finish line as quickly as the legislature was able to do so, but at the time, everybody said, "Okay, we're gonna have to come back to deal with this." Right now, we are currently trying to better understand what a permanent solution would look like and are working with incredible lawyers to identify that, and hopefully we'll have an answer to that soon, but, you know, we also know that there's a lot of talk about the regulations as we've already talked about, so I think another kind of line of work that we're gonna have to be doing is defending against some of those burdens and regulations, and then three, about, you know, the immunity law that you're saying, I think, you know, if it was the best kind of, you know, negotiation that I think the legislators were able to land on, was it ideal? No, but are we incredibly grateful for it? Yes, and, you know, I will say, I do think that there are some folks that think, like, "Oh, there's shields, IVF, you know, "providers from all, you know, harmful," or from all causes of action or all lawsuits, and that's not true, you know, in the law it actually states that IVF providers are still open to medical malpractice if you know that occurs, and so, but, again, we still believe that there's more work to do to make sure that we have full and permanent protection, and that's the work that we're gonna be doing ahead. I would add to that, Jess, you know, the physicians side, we're trying to educate, right? There's so many misconceptions about IVF, what it means, and about the actual regulations that already exist. You know, we're one of them as highly regulated medical subspecialties already with regulations at the federal level from CAP and CLIA and the FDA, and then, you know, state regulations with our state medical board, and then there's professional self-regulation through ASRN and SARTs and ABOGs. So we already hold ourselves and put ourselves through significant regulations, and there were the current times that, you know, clear up these misconceptions and provide education to those in the state that wanna help us achieve the full and permanent act of IVF. - Real quick, and we're real short on time here, but the Trump proposal to make, I guess, universal coverage for IVF, I mean, it sounds good in theory. In practice, though, I mean, you already have kind of a weird supply and demand situation. Either way, have you got any thoughts on that? - We are thrilled to see back partisan support for IVF treatments, I think that's huge. So we're focusing on that positive, you know, I'm not a politician, but to hear your concerns about, you know, how does this actually work in practice? But I think the message was loud and clear that both President Trump and the Democratic Party are supporters of IVF treatments. - All right. - And I would just add, you know, our goal is full and permanent protection first, and we're gonna take support from anyone who's ready to help us at this fight. They're really grateful for President Trump's comments and support on this. - Ladies, I appreciate your time this morning. Thanks for hopping on, and maybe in the future we get you on again. - Thank you so much, yeah. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Corinne O'Brien with the Fight for Alabama Family Coalition and from Alabama Fidelity, Dr. Mamie McLean, we gotta get a break here. We'll be right back. This is the JetBore Show on F&TALK 106.5. ♪ Big J-A-Lone ♪