By Dave Andrusko

Ruby Torres

On July 1, a new law went into effect in Arizona which in cases of divorce and subsequent disputes over frozen embryos will give custody to the parent who would “allow the in vitro embryos to develop to birth,” the Arizona Republic reported.

According to reporter Kaila White

The bill …would override any agreements or contracts that the couple previously had on the matter, and would ignore either person’s current objections or concerns.

It also outlines that the spouse who does not receive the embryos would not have parental rights or responsibilities to any resulting children unless they agree to them.

Senate Bill 1393 was a first-in-the-nation and would reverse the usual outcomes in disputes where the mother wants one or more of the frozen embryos implanted and the father does not. According to the Washington Post’s Ariana Eunjung Cha

With the number of frozen embryos in the United States soaring into the millions, disputes over who owns them are also on the rise. Judges have often — but not always — ruled in favor of the person who does not want the embryos used, sometimes ordering them destroyed, following the theory that no one should be forced to become a parent.

The “Torres” mentioned is Ruby Torres, a cancer survivor who sees the frozen embryos as her last chance to have a biological baby of her own. According to many news accounts, in July 2014, Torres and John Joseph Terrell, her then-finance, completed in vitro fertilization out of which seven frozen embryos were created. (This was prior to Torres undergoing chemotherapy and radiation for breast cancer.) White writes

Last year, a judge ruled during divorce proceedings that although Phoenix lawyer Ruby Torres wanted children, the seven frozen embryos she created with her ex-husband would be donated instead.

Torres and her ex-husband did in vitro fertilization after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but her husband filed for divorce after she became healthy again and told the court he did not want children with her.

She said the embryos were her last chance at having biological children, but the judge ruled that evidence favored Terrell’s right not to be a parent over Torres’ desire to have a biological child.

According to the Post’s Cha, “in August, the judge made the decision for them. She said Torres had no right to use the embryos. But, in a surprising twist, the judge said they should not be destroyed. Instead, they should be put up for donation. Torres could not bear her own baby — but a stranger could.”

State Sen. Nancy Barto said she was inspired by Torres’s case to introduce the legislation.

If someone selects Torres’s embryos, Barto told fellow legislators, “there will be children out there that Ruby will never be able to meet or care for” and the children “will never be able to know their genetic history.”

In her account, Cha noted that “judges in numerous states, including Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Jersey and California, have been swayed by that argument”—the argument that it could be “exceedingly painful” to have children born against one’s wishes. She then uses cases in California and Colorado as illustrations.

However, she also wrote

Decisions in other major cases have gone in different directions. In Illinois and Pennsylvania, embryos have been awarded to women because they could otherwise not reproduce. In others, embryos have been ordered to be donated to research or to remain frozen indefinitely until a time when there is “mutual agreement.”

There is opposition to Senate Bill 1393 on many grounds including from pro-abortionists who “say any legal endorsement of those arguments, if upheld, would effectively gut the right to an abortion,” Cha writes. “If a days-old embryo in a freezer has a right to life, why not a days-old embryo in utero?”

Torres is appealing Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Ronee Korbin Steiner’s decision. “Oral arguments were made in June, and a ruling is expected any day,” according to Cha.