This is a follow up to BLOG POST RE:
In-Vitro Fertilization: The Next Battlefield for Defending the Sanctity of Life
– exploring the February 2024 ALABAMA SUPREME COURT DECISION
Alabama clinics balked after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled
that fertilized eggs have personhood rights. The largest hospital in Alabama
immediately halted in-vitro fertilization services as they grappled with the
legal ramifications of the ruling. It is understandable that clinics would
pause to assess how to move forward with the safe handling of an embryo now
deemed an “extrauterine child.” Many clinics, however, rather than adapt, have closed,
and lobbied legislators to circumvent the ruling. Clinics
have represented the issue in the media as if there were no way forward under
the ruling—as if IVF has been outright banned. One Alabama IVF clinic that
immediately ceased operation called the ruling a “burden on families who want
to bring babies into this world.” That same clinic is working hard to alert
legislatures to the “far reaching negative impact” this ruling will have “on
the women of Alabama.” The problem with this position is that Alabama has
ensured greater protection for females across the state, as women are now
protected as ‘persons’ from conception, in numbers far exceeding those who’s
IVF treatment may be delayed. This is not a “negative” impact on the women of
Alabama, but an overall positive one. Also, the increased burden on IVF clinics
to handle embryos with care certainly does not necessitate the elimination of IVF
altogether.
Religion and politics are the most likely reasons for the
media and clinic push-back against the recent decision. Media
outlets have been quick to point to the court’s ruling as “religious”: “The
Alabama IVF ruling uses faux scientific language to justify a religious
position”), and many of the same groups who strongly opposed Alabama’s abortion
ban see this ruling as simply another pro-life measure. Political momentum in
the state is building, as a vocal minority has wrapped up the IVF decision
(with the wrong understanding that the court’s ruling has essentially banned
IVF) with hostility toward Alabama’s total ban on abortion. Marilyn
Lands, a Democrat who won a seat in the state senate, said “Today, Alabama
women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery
and across the nation. Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions
abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.”
The media has been vigorously spinning the recent IVF ruling as ‘anti-woman’
and ‘anti-IVF’, threatening not only to
swing the pendulum back to center, but to throw it to the left, uprooting the
legislature’s ban on abortion as well. For now, the battle in Alabama has found
some brief rest: Several
shuttered clinics have resumed operation after lawmakers passed legislation
protecting doctors at IVF clinics from liability regarding embryos. As it stands now, the law assigns personhood
to embryos, but IVF doctors are not liable for harm to the embryo. Interestingly,
Conservatives in Alabama and nationally lay divided on the issue. See Why
‘Fetal Personhood’ Is Roiling the Right - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
). Maintaining a ‘life begins at conception’ approach means treating fertilized
eggs as people, and this position has seemed politically untenable to some in
the prolife movement. In March, the New York Times called this out, saying that
the IVF issue has put the pro-life movement’s “uncompromising principle” on a
“collision course with political reality.” And this is true. In the words of
Dr. Suess’s Horton (Horton Hears a Who), “A person’s a person, no matter
how small.” This principle is uncompromising, and it is on a rapidly
approaching collision course with a political reality that taking a stand for
life at every stage is not as popular as a more mainstream anti-abortion
position. Many Americans believe that a woman should be able to chose to end
the life of her unborn child at ‘some’ stage, or under ‘certain’ circumstances.
At the same time, if life begins at conception, then the embryo deserves the
same protection any of us do. While Alabama works to sort this out, a vocal
minority has apparently convinced state legislators that there is no way to
adapt clinic practices to protect an embryo. Clinics frame the issue as
anti-woman’ and ‘overburdening.’ Never mind that clinics already see living patients
and accommodate them just fine. How much easier would it be to care for a much
more manageable person—one who never complains, and who can be kept safe in a
vault?
The war over the personhood of the unborn child is proving to
be the great battle of our day. Roe has given way to Dobbs,
Alabama has banned abortion outright, and her highest court has protected life
from conception. As the nation looks to Alabama, will political ideologies and
battles over rights trample and stamp out the best interest of the child?
Children, born or unborn, can hardly speak for themselves over the noise of
war. The voices crying out for the child casualties of this fray are not the
voices promoted by the media at large. I pray that when the dust settles on
this long-fought war, that the smallest among us—the least of these—will be
protected just as we who have been born are protected; just as we, who have
been born, can see the sun, and feel the wind, and hear a song, or sing one.
Everyone, and especially the one who can’t fight for himself,
is precious, and deserving of a chance to have what we, who are born, have.
Life has no price or value. There is no measure for the gift of life, and there
is no life that is not worth fighting for. This is the “uncompromising
principle” of the pro-life movement, as the New York Times aptly put it. Even the
small, and even the weak. Whether in an incubator, a womb, or a lab, a person’s
a person, no matter how small. This is the beginning of family restoration.
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