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Four and a half long, long years ago, in the beforetimes of 2019, I made a video about Alabama passing of an abortion ban, called the Human Life Protection Act, because of course it was called that. The bill made abortion illegal, even in cases of rape, and called for a 99-year imprisonment of doctors who perform abortions. In that video, I made reference to an exchange that happened in the Alabama state Senate: Democratic state Senator Rodger Mel Smitherman asked “why would fertilized eggs in the womb immediately be granted personhood, but not the thousands upon thousands of fertilized eggs in fertility clinics?” To which Republican State Senator Clyde Chambliss replied, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”
This brought up several issues: first of all, this was a politician literally saying the quiet part out loud, that the purpose of the bill was NOT to “protect human life” but to punish women. Because if the true purpose was to protect fertilized eggs, those thousands upon thousands of fertility clinic eggs would have absolutely been included at the outset.
But it also highlighted something that abortion rights activists have been saying for a very long time: these badly written, pseudoscientific laws would be a slippery slope to not just punishing poor women who do not want to give birth, but to also punishing middle class and rich women who DO want to give birth, and one of those obvious ways is through outlawing IVF, or in vitro fertilization, the process by which people harvest their eggs, fertilize them with sperm in a petri dish, and then either have them implanted to hopefully carry to term and/or freeze them for possible future implantation.
I find it interesting because much like outlawing abortion even in cases of rape, the Christian evangelical opposition to IVF seems ridiculous and barbaric to the average normal person but it really is the most ideologically consistent position these assholes can have: if you truly, fully believe that a fertilized egg is exactly the same as a fully grown human being deserving of all the same rights, and in some cases deserving of MORE rights than a living pubescent or adult woman, then yes, this is what you should advocate for. Like, IVF should be the very first thing you go after because if women getting abortions are bad, then IVF is a god damn embryonic holocaust. Millions upon millions of fertilized eggs are created only to be thrown away in the process, not even counting the ones that are implanted but never result in a live birth.
Obviously, the good Lord God himself destroys more fertilized eggs every year thanks to human beings’ high rate of miscarriage, with 40-60% of all embryos naturally failing to make it to birth. So, if 140 million babies are born each year, that’s another 140 million killed by God. But there’s not a whole lot for evangelicals to do about that, besides provide better prenatal care for pregnant people, but let’s not get crazy. Easier to just outlaw IVF.
Anyway, back in 2019 in order to get that bill passed, the Republicans would not have been able to admit that yes, this law will naturally lead to an IVF ban, which is why they instead had to admit that they just wanted to punish women.
It’s been five years, though, and Roe v. Wade is dead, so now the Overton window has shifted rightward enough for the inevitable: the Alabama Supreme Court has, just last week, confirmed that thanks to the 2019 Human Life Protection Act, fertilized eggs at IVF clinics are now “children.”
This all happened thanks to an IVF patient gaining access to the facility’s freezer where they grabbed some eggs, burned their hands, and dropped them, destroying all the embryos. The patients whose embryos those were sued the facility for the wrongful death of a minor. A lower court threw it out but the Supreme Court picked it up and determined that those patients were correct.
The irony is that by “winning,” those patients basically guaranteed that every other potential IVF patient won’t be able to have children unless they have the time and money to flee to another, better state. The only dissenting judge in this case wrote that “The creation of frozen embryos will end in Alabama. No rational medical provider would continue to provide services for creating and maintaining frozen embryos knowing that they must continue to maintain such frozen embryos forever or risk the penalty of a Wrongful Death Act claim for punitive damages.”
It will not surprise you to note that the Christian God was cited in the ruling dozens of times, because, Founding Fathers and First Amendments be damned, America is now a theocracy.
So what’s next? Well, we will see similar cases popping up in every other red state to effectively ban IVF there, as well, and eventually the federal court will probably take a swing at things. My hope is that IVF patients start claiming their fertilized eggs on their state income taxes, apply for state childcare aid, and of course register any embryo of appropriate age to vote.
I find all this very interesting, because sensible people were already fired up about the fall of Roe v. Wade and will hopefully show it at the polls this year, but I’d bet there are an awful lot of middle class and wealthy people who didn’t care about any of that because they thought it didn’t affect them or their loved ones. Last fall, a Pew Research poll found that 42% of Americans have either used fertility treatments or know someone who has, a number that has gone up dramatically in the past few years. Most of those people are white and wealthy.
Only a small percentage of people end up getting IVF, specifically, but plenty of them have had fertility issues and have thus considered that they might end up needing it. Thanks in part to how our society tends to demonize women for getting abortions, IVF is a procedure that privileged people are much more likely to consider getting themselves, and they’re much more likely to have sympathy for someone who undergoes it.
I, of course, am the opposite because I’m a heartless monster who does not understand this overwhelming biological urge to give birth at all costs rather than just pick up one of those babies that nobody else wants, but hey, different strokes!
So while I’m NOT happy that this judgment will make life much harder for the many people who are hoping to get pregnant via IVF, and I’m not happy to see the Religious Right continue their relentless march towards governing everything we can do with our bodies, in a strange way, I’m almost glad that this happened so quickly after Roe v. Wade was struck down. I figured the evangelicals would see how extremely unpopular the Dobbs decision was and therefore wait until after the election in November to move ahead, but we might actually pick up some new slightly more progressive voters in Alabama thanks to this. Hey, that’s just me, always looking for the silver lining.
If you’re in Alabama (or the rest of the US), do please go out and vote this November. If you’re anywhere and have some money to spare, please consider helping out the reproductive healthcare workers at West Alabama Women’s Center who are struggling to remain open despite the fact that they can’t even provide abortions anymore. They provide in-patient care for people who can get to them, plus constant telehealth appointments for patients across the rest of the state. Go to ALReproHealth.com and give them some cash. If you don’t have it, no worries! As thanks for watching and sharing this video, I gave them some for you.
