More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision to consider frozen embryos as human life warns of the impact of theocratic decision-making.
Ruling that embryos are human life with legal rights is making a theological statement, rather than a legal or scientific one. We’re watching before our eyes a clear erosion of church and state.
The availability of in-vitro fertilization in Alabama may now be in question after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that embryos kept in clinic freezers are considered persons under the law, and protected by the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. It’s a shocking and jarring decision that radically extends the bounds of legal personhood, tosses any claims to originalism aside, and seems primed to make a variety of fertility treatments either extremely costly for patients, or extremely legally risky for clinicians.
IVF is, unfortunately, not safe from the anti-abortion movement. Many of the movement’s leaders have indicated that they would like to outlaw it, and while right now they have bigger fish to fry, abortion opponents have never stopped at simply (“simply”) banning abortion. They want full control over reproduction, and over women specifically. And Alabama just put us all one step closer to their ultimate goal.
Without the protections of Roe, we stand to see gross inequalities in fertility care and reproductive decision-making.
State laws defining ‘life’ as the moment an egg is fertilized will limit or prohibit the freezing or discarding of embryos—a process fundamental to successful fertility treatments. These practices could all but vanish in some places. These restrictions emerge at a moment where fertility technology is becoming ever more precise. Combined with existing anti-poor fertility policies, the reality is that poor women of color will have even less opportunity to determine the time and circumstance in which they decide to have a family.
Almost 2 percent of babies born in the United States are the result of fertility treatments, together referred to as assisted reproductive technologies (ART). The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court threatens the ability to access the treatments people need to build their families, such as ART.
