More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Alabama Supreme Court decision on IVF—based neither in good science nor good law—exemplifies how the anti-abortion movement negatively affects us all, whether we are seeking to have children or not.
It is essential, now more than ever, that politicians and judges are dedicated to preserving access to full spectrum reproductive healthcare for all.
Extreme House Republicans have been dangling the threat of a government shutdown for months, playing politics with the lives of real people. In addition to being disruptive, wasteful and unnecessary, a government shutdown would have a deep and scarring impact on those facing food insecurity and poverty. This is not a game.
Resistance to safety net programs like the expanded child tax credit, SNAP and WIC is rooted in racist, misogynistic, tired and offensive stereotypes that blame and shame people, rather than help them when they need it most.
The Alabama Supreme Court recently shocked the nation when it held that the word “child” includes frozen embryos. Treating an embryo as the equivalent of a child upends the fertility industry, as it threatens to end in vitro fertilization (IVF) services and puts the status of embryos already in storage in serious question.
While these implications are important to untangle, the brunt of the effects of fetal personhood will fall not upon families with the resources to undergo IVF, but rather on poor and non-white women. Every decision made by a pregnant person could be second-guessed by the government. Every step outside of the most risk-averse approach to pregnancy puts the pregnant person under the microscope of the state.
Author Tracy Mayo reflects on her pregnancy at 14 and the denial of her reproductive rights, as well as what Dobbs means for stories like hers.
“I had done the worst possible thing for an officer’s daughter: disobeyed orders and shown no discipline. So I was given a new order: Give up my baby at birth and never speak of him again.”
U.S. patriarchal authoritarianism is on the rise, and democracy is on the decline. But day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. The fight is far from over. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.
Since our last report: Modern surveillance tools pose an increasing threat to pregnant people and those helping them access care; a groundbreaking study proving the safety and effectiveness of telehealth abortion; in rare bipartisan move, Congress expanded the child tax credit for the next three years, lifting 400,000 children above the poverty line by 2025; rest in power, Nex Benedict; and more.
Back for its third year, Front and Center is a groundbreaking Ms. series that offers first-person accounts of Black mothers living in Jackson, Miss., receiving a guaranteed income. First launched in 2018, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT) is about to enter its fifth cohort, bringing the number of moms served to more than 400 and making it the longest-running guaranteed income program in the country. Across the country, guaranteed income pilots like MMT are finding that recipients are overwhelmingly using their payments for basic needs like groceries, housing and transportation.
“I’ve always had a good relationship with my kids, but MMT has allowed me to say ‘yes’ more. … My son and I both have birthdays coming up and I told him we could plan something fun, maybe go out of town. I’ve never taken them out of town before.”
For over a decade, I have been faced with constant reminders of the long and winding road it took for me to become a mother.
In the wake of last week’s Alabama Supreme Court ruling, there are very obvious places along the way where the whims of a judge who would like a Christian theocracy would supersede the wishes of myself, my husband and the suggestions of my doctors—well-educated and well-known experts in their field.
The Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling on Feb. 16 by an 8-1 majority that frozen embryos are constituted as “unborn children,” mirroring the state’s Constitution which recognizes rights of “the unborn.” The first of its kind, the ruling symptomatic of the 21st-century emergence of fetal personhood legislation embedded within Christian fundamentalism in the United States.
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.
