Fearmongering About Alabama Supreme Court Embryo Ruling Obscures Truth About Reproductive Tech
Less than one week after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos are children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, several fertility facilities brought their in vitro fertilization operations to a screeching halt. Republican and Democrat legislators also jumped to protect the largely unregulated assisted reproductive technology industry.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) announced Wednesday that it would suspend IVF until further notice to “evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments.”
UAB’s pause was quickly mimicked by Alabama Fertility Specialists (AFS), which decided to “hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists,” and The Center for Reproductive Medicine at Mobile Infirmary, the fertility facility at the center of the landmark case.
All blamed the state supreme court even though the justices did not attempt to nitpick or govern the operations of fertility facilities in its ruling. They were joined by corporate media and Democrats, which gladly amplified complaints about considering embryos humans.
Instead of exploring ways to regulate the unethical and immoral practices Big Fertility employs, lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle began working to immortalize the serial creation and destruction of human lives in their tiniest form in state and federal law. The National Republican Senatorial Committee even went so far as to claim this week that the very pro-life decision to consider embryos human life is merely “fodder for Democrats hoping to manipulate the abortion issue for electoral gain.”
Don’t Be Fooled
CBS Mornings aired the “anger” of Jasmine York, a 34-year-old mother whose March embryo transfer could be postponed due to UofA’s IVF pause. York agreed with the host that IVF is her “last hope to have a baby” due to her damaged fallopian tubes, but ended the segment by declaring the embryos she created with her husband are “not living children.”
“If they were, things would be a lot different in my world and all of these other women’s worlds,” York concluded. “We want living children. That’s our goal.”
Vice President Kamala Harris even complained that Alabamans are being “deprived of access to IVF.”
While it’s true that some Big Fertility customers aren’t getting what they paid for after, it wasn’t the Alabama Supreme Court that stopped them. The Alabama court’s controversial ruling never addressed how fertility facilities in the Cotton State should approach ART or creating embryos in labs. It certainly didn’t stop anyone from implanting already created embryos, as in York’s case.
Instead, the majority of justices simply held, in accordance with the state’s constitution and legal precedent, that embryos, which are scientifically deemed life at conception, are considered minors under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The only reason Alabama babymaking specialists decided to halt IVF is because they knew they could suddenly be on the legal hook for negligence for willfully destroying viable embryos in the name of science and success.
Until now, fertility facilities’ “standard practice” for IVF required the serial manufacturing, “grading,” and destruction of hundreds of millions of embryos, some of which were likely viable, each year. At least two, AFS and UAB, offer unreliable genetic testing which not only pits frozen siblings against each other but can result in indefinite shelving, reduced chance of survival, or death of the embryos.
To inflate their patients’ chances of “successful pregnancy” and market IVF as a foolproof way to ensure parenthood, embryologists often encourage their customers to give dozens of harvested eggs for fertilization because more is linked to a higher rate of successful pregnancies. What’s not always considered or even properly discussed with clients is that leftover embryos must be disposed of or kept in expensive freezers along with one million other abandoned test tube babies.
Protecting Embryos Is Pro-Life
Knee-jerk reactions like those of the fertility facilities, corporate media, and even the Biden administration about the Alabama court’s decision are designed to provoke political outrage, similar to how pro-abortion doctors pretended to worry about treating ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. Both had nothing to do with Roe v. Wade or abortion and were not curbed in the 2022 decision or any state laws, but quickly became convenient talking points for pro-abortion activists to fearmonger about pro-life politicians and policies.
That being said, just because the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling is narrow doesn’t mean this decision shouldn’t inform future decisions about how fertility facilities use ART. There can and should be more reproductive technology regulation across the United States.
ART, as most fertility facilities apply it, does not support the idea that all life deserves a chance. IVF may yield tens of thousands of babies each year, but it also orders the death of hundreds of millions more. All “living children” start as embryos but, thanks to fertility facilities’ adoption of ART “standard practice,” most embryos do not continue to be living children.
The real “manipulation of the abortion issue,” of course, is pretending that life in its newest, most delicate form, doesn’t deserve legal protection. The ART baby-making and abortion baby-taking industries thrive on adults’ selfish desires to order and pay for the creation of a child without regard for that child’s right to life.
Being pro-baby and pro-life doesn’t mean giving Big Fertility, a multi-billion dollar industry, permission to do whatever they please because scientific advancements have made it possible. Being pro-baby and pro-life means giving every child, whose life inarguably begins at the moment of conception, the best chance of survival.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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