TALLAHASSEE—A Florida bill expanding the state’s wrongful death act to fetuses passed its first House committee on Thursday, sparking a debate on IVF procedures and causes of action against Floridians who help women get abortions.
This is the second time Florida lawmakers have attempted to get a fetal wrongful death bill across the finish line.
Last year, a similar version was suddenly withdrawn amid concerns about defining fetal personhood and restricting in vitro fertilization procedures. And while the Senate this year has filed an identical version to the 2024 bill, Republican Rep. Sam Greco’s HB 1517 explicitly bans wrongful death actions from being brought against doctors providing IVF procedures.
“The bill’s cause of action does not apply to mothers and medical providers for lawful care,” said Greco, a freshman lawmaker representing St. Augustine, in Thursday’s House Civil Justice and Claims Subcommittee.
“It allows mothers and families to recover in the tragic instance when they lose their unborn child,” he added, noting that Florida is just one of six states that haven't expanded the Wrongful Death Act to allow parents to collect damages for the reckless or negligent death of a fetus.
The measure came under heavy scrutiny last year, when bill sponsor Sen. Erin Grall, a Republican, amended the bill to define an unborn child as a human at any stage in development—borrowing the definition from another state statute. But critics worried that defining fetal personhood may be laying the foundation for more stringent abortion laws and could hurt IVF practices.
The fears were amplified by the Alabama Supreme Court ruling in 2024 that frozen embryos are unborn, “extrauterine” children. Abortion rights groups claimed this decision was the result of a “slow creep” beginning a decade earlier, when the state Supreme Court ruled that fetuses are children in criminal cases involving exposure to controlled substances, NPR reported.
The bill was withdrawn, and then-Florida Senate President Kathleen Passidomo told reporters it was “wrong” to do a fetal personhood bill in a liability statute.
But now it’s back—and to avoid last year’s pitfalls, the House version explicitly prohibits a cause of action against a doctor performing “assisted reproductive technologies” like IVF.
How Do Floridians Feel About The Bill?
Andrew Shirvell, founder of the conservative lobbying group Florida Voice for the Unborn, told lawmakers on Thursday that while he supported expanding the Wrongful Death Act to fetuses, he took issue with the bill carving out an exception for doctors performing IVF treatments.
“The [bill] purposely excludes unborn children who are frozen as embryos and are stored in freezers as a result of being created through IVF or other unethical assisted reproductive technologies,” Shirvell said, urging an amendment to ban the fertility treatment.
Critics on the left, meanwhile, argued that Greco’s bill defining personhood, while well-intentioned, could open a pathway for a cause of action against those who aid women seeking abortions and could be used to “lay a foundation” for an all-out abortion ban.
“I think this legislation is conflating a fetus with a living child that’s outside of the womb,” said Democrat Rep. Michele Rayner. “This is a slippery slope that will be granting legal rights to fetuses.”
Rayner touched on the abortion debate, which has plagued Florida conversations since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and the Republican-dominated Legislature’s 15-week ban on the procedure soon after. They muscled through a six-week ban a year later, resulting in a pro-choice citizens group gathering over a million signatures to put a pro-abortion amendment on the ballot.
It failed.
HB 1517 did not.
It passed the Civil Claims Committee in a 13 to 3 vote, and will next head to the House Judiciary Committee.
