I Want To Put A Baby In You: Military Babies
Should the U.S. government be providing greater access to, and coverage for, assisted reproductive technology to members of our nation’s military?
Congratulations! Before digging into today’s topic, a couple of shout outs. First to Lucy Liu. Congratulations on baby Rockwell, and thank you for your bravery opening up about your experience growing your family through gestational surrogacy. An article on Lucy Liu’s experience is here.
Second, congratulations to Janet Jackson on her pregnancy! At just shy of her 50th birthday, Jackson has not given any details about her experience, but my educated guess is that assisted reproductive technology may have helped her try to realize her family-building dreams.
Military Baby-Making Benefits?
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Now we move on to one of the latest hot button issues in assisted reproductive technology: should the U.S. government be providing greater access to, and coverage for, assisted reproductive technology to members of our nation’s military?
Elective Sperm and Egg Cryopreservation. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced a new military program that would give active-duty members the option of freezing their eggs or sperm. Carter described the multiple benefits of the new program as assisting those who suffered from combat-related injuries that impaired their fertility. (Sadly, more than 1,300 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan incurred wounds to their reproductive organs.)
Moreover, Carter touted the program as allowing soldiers to have greater flexibility in determining the timing of when to start a family. Unsurprisingly, deployment of one partner or both can make the timing of baby-making challenging at best.
A number of commentators have applauded this as a positive step, while at the same time voicing the opinion that it’s not nearly enough. Indeed, for the soldiers who have lost the ability to have a family already, freezing eggs or sperm hardly works.
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What If The Damage Has Already Been Done? Army Corporal Tyler Wilson is an example of a soldier who believes the military should do more. In 2005, Corporal Wilson was injured in Afghanistan, and is permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Now, Corporal Wilson and his fiancé Crystal are hoping to start a family. But they find themselves forced to pay over $15,000 for every IVF treatment.
A prominent reproductive endocrinologist in Colorado, Dr. William Schoolcraft, has offered to cover half of the treatment costs. Dr. Schoolcraft’s clinic, the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine (CCRM), has opted into a program called Serving Our Veterans, which provides discounted fertility treatment for veterans wounded during service. The program is supported by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), described further here.
No IVF For Veterans.
In 2012, the military started to allow certain wounded active members of the military to use IVF services; however, few military personnel have been able to take advantage of this change. Unfortunately, the injuries that qualify service members for the program are generally the same injuries that require them to be quickly discharged from active status. And once they are no longer active, their coverage moves to the purview of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Former service members face not only inaction, but a statutory bar to receiving IVF. A law passed nearly 20 years ago prohibits the Department of Veterans Affairs from providing IVF services to veterans regardless of need based on injury while in service. While IVF was less successful and less understood at that time, it appears that many of the objections that fueled the ban are the same ones we see today. These are primarily concerns that IVF creates extra embryos, and that these embryos deserve more sacred treatment than the inevitable result of being discarded.
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Attempting To Change The Law. For quite some time, ASRM has been a strong advocate for HR 2257, a bill sponsored by House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-FL-1). The bill eliminates the ban on providing IVF services through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Unfortunately, the bill was referred to the House Subcommittee on Health a year ago, and is stalled there.
Attempting a different tactic, last month,Representative Miller introduced a bill that would give soldiers who were paralyzed or whose reproductive organs were injured in combat a lump sum payout of $20,000. Miller attempted to assuage concerns about embryo destruction by emphasizing that the lump sum could be used for adoption or foster care expenses.
From a different angle, a recent amendment was added to the Veterans Affairs appropriations bill by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA). The amendment would allocate $88 million to cover fertility treatment for veterans with impaired fertility due to injuries in the line of duty. The Senate Appropriations Committee voted in favor of the amendment, and it may face the full Senate later this year.
It is difficult to fathom that while the government will compensate a soldier for permanent damage incurred while in the line of duty—and in some cases would be willing to also provide fertility treatment for a soldier whose fertility was impaired in the line of duty—fertility benefits disappear at the moment of discharge. Clearly, change needs to happen. The U.S. government should be there for those who sacrificed their ability to have a family for our nation, especially given that in so many cases the advancement of assisted reproductive technology has made that fix possible.
Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, adoption, and estate planning. You can reach her at [email protected].
