By Sarah Ladd
Kentucky Lantern
A bill giving Kentucky’s health care providers criminal immunity for medical mistakes — which one lawmaker thinks will enshrine protections for in vitro fertilization by default — is on its way to Gov. Andy Beshear’s desk.
House Bill 159, which would decriminalize medical mistakes made by health care providers, passed the House in February unanimously. On Friday it cleared the Senate — also unanimously.
The bill follows a 2022 Tennessee case in which a nurse was found guilty after a patient died from a medical mistake. The conviction led to protests and resignations within the health care community, KFF Health News has reported.
A pharmacy technician passes items to a nurse from within a sterile area at the James Graham Brown Cancer Center in Louisville. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images, via Kentucky Lantern)
The Kentucky Nurses Association says that if medical mistakes are criminalized, providers are less likely to report them.
“I’m all for responsibility for medical errors,” said Sen. Phillip Wheeler, R-Pikeville, who carried the bill to the Senate floor on the 54th day of the 60-day legislative session. “I think that that is an appropriate domain for civil justice and not for the criminal justice system.”
Fruit Hill Republican Sen. Whitney Westerfield, who in February filed a bill seeking to protect access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Kentucky, said he believes HB 159 will accomplish his goal by default. His colleague, Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, D-Louisville, filed a similar bill to protect IVF.
“Neither of our bills have advanced,” Westerfield said while voting in favor of HB 159, which he said will cover IVF access because of its “broad” definition of the word “providers.”
The criminal liability bill, sponsored by Rep. Patrick Flannery, R-Olive Hill, protects “a person providing health services” who is appropriately licensed and/or certified.
Bills to protect access to IVF, which is used to treat infertility and can help other people trying to get pregnant to do so, came this session in response to a ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court stating that frozen embryos are children.
The ruling led to concerns that it could deter people in Alabama from attempting to conceive children via IVF, which sometimes involves freezing embryos for future attempts at insemination. Several clinics in Alabama, including the University of Alabama Birmingham, paused IVF treatments and embryo transfers in response to the ruling.
Louisville Democratic Rep. Daniel Grossberg filed a similar IVF protection in House Bill 757. His goes a step further than the Senate bills and states explicitly, “A fertilized human egg or human embryo that exists in any form outside of the uterus of a human body shall not be considered an unborn child, a minor child, a natural person, or any other term that connotes a human being for any purpose under state law.”
Grossberg’s bill has not received a committee assignment.
But House Bill 159, Westerfield said, will protect IVF.
“I think this bill accomplishes that and does so without necessary amendments or changes,” Westerfield said. “And so as a proud father of now four IVF children, I’m proud to see this bill make final passage and head to the governor.”
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.
