Last Wednesday a new law went into effect that will allow Georgia residents to adopt embryos, and the bill was aided by the support of Haralson County Sherrif’s Department Public Information Officer Jim Beck, who also happens to be the president of the Georgia Christian Coalition.

“This legislation was one of my top priorities this year,” Beck said. “And [the Georgia Christian Coalition] teamed with Georgia Right to Life to try and get this passed.”

Beck said the main role the GCC and Georgia Right to Life organizations played in getting this bill through the Georgia General Assembly was to provide medical information and experts to the committees that took the bill under consideration. The bill was officially sponsored by Representatives James Mills, Melvin Everson, Jerry Keen, Ben Harbin, Len Walker and Ed Setzler, and Senator David Shafer, among others. The governor signed the legislation on May 5 with an effective date of July 1.

Beck says this legislation is a prime example of the law catching up with technology and is addressing a real problem.

As Beck explained, if a couple goes to a fertility clinic to harvest eggs and create embryos, more embryos are created than will probably be needed in case the first embryos do not take. Sometimes, these extra embryos are abandoned, leaving the clinic with extra embryos on their hands, which they then must store. Beck says this law gives the clinics and embryo owners another option of what to do with extra or abandoned embryos other than destruction.

“[Embryos] are expensive to store, and there was this question of what to do with abandoned embryos. There was no mechanism that would allow the clinics to give the embryo to someone else,” Beck said. “Science had gotten ahead of our laws, so we had to bring the law up to date.”

Under the new law, a person may adopt an embryo and the state would see any child that resulted from the implantation of that embryo as the legal child of that recipient. In fact, Beck said adopting an embryo will have less red tape than a traditional adoption.

Beck said when it comes to parental rights and the adoption processes “the state will make no distinction between a woman who gets pregnant the traditional way and a woman who is implanted.”

In order to adopt an embryo, the intended parent must first enter into a contract with the legal embryo custodian and sign the contract in front of a witness and a notary. The intended parent may then petition the superior court for an expedited order of adoption or parentage. Once the legal process is complete, the former embryo custodian will no longer retain “any future parental rights and responsibilities,” according to the bill.

Despite the fact that the paper work is relatively easy when compared with a traditional adoption, Beck says he doesn’t believe people will enter into these contracts on a whim.

“This isn’t something people will do lightly because it is so expensive,” Beck.

Beck also acknowledged that though the new law does not give embryos the same rights as a person, the bill does give the embryos a bit more importance, and he believes the bill was an appropriate step.

“This law is changing the way we treat embryos. They were simply considered property [before]. While it doesn’t bestow personhood on the embryos, [the law] makes them more important than basic property like bicycles or cars.”