I’d like to discuss the implication of the Alabama court ruling that frozen embryos are children. I’m also interested if Dopers know whether this is appealable.
Some implications, off the top of my head:
IVF is dead in the state
Someone could be prosecuted for homicide or murder for mishandling or discarding frozen embryos
This ruling provides a roadmap for other states to follow suit
If it goes to SCOTUS and they agree, this could lead to a nationwide ban on IVF
Here’s a gift link from the NYT about this ruling:
Here’s an interesting quote from a concurring opinion:
“Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, citing scripture.
Not really any pretense about any wall of separation there.
I will be following along, but not able to post much during the day. I’d like to avoid a standard-issue abortion debate if possible. I’m most interested in the frozen embryo implications, although granting full personhood to embryos is certainly a large step towards making abortion illegal nationwide.
I think that is absolutely true. But, IVF is very expensive so I suspect couples who want to use that service will have little trouble traveling to the next state over to do the same thing.
Interestingly, the couples that filed the original suit seeking damages for wrongful death had their embryos frozen for IVF purposes. Their actions may bring about the end of IVF procedures in the State.
While IVF is expensive, health insurance does cover it in many plans. We would have never been able to pay for it out of pocket. I don’t know for sure, but I would highly doubt that our health insurance company would have paid for us to have services out of state/network.
Here’s what the ruling specifically says (from a link given in the OP’s linked article):
This seems to me at least to have the virtue of consistency: if it’s illegal to kill an embryo that’s in a woman’s uterus, why shouldn’t it be illegal to kill an embryo that is outside the uterus?
If a couple has a frozen embryo must it be maintained forever? Even if the couple breaks up and don’t want it. Or, they both die. Even of old age. By this ruling all embryos MUST be maintained forever. Even if no one is paying to maintain them. Anything else is murder.
Which is why all IVF treatment will leave that state.
I’m curious what other child welfare laws apply to frozen embryos. Once they’ve been frozen for five years, must they be enrolled in kindergarten? If they don’t learn at the same pace as other children, does the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act kick in? If they live in crowded conditions–say, ten thousand children to a room–is this considered neglect or abuse? What if their living quarters are kept at subfreezing temperatures–is this abuse?
Unless there’s some kind of grace period or grandfather clause, it’s too late for that for any IVF operation in the state that already has an inventory of frozen embryos unborn children
What are they going to do? Pack up the embryo-cicles with the rest of their stuff when they move? They can’t leave them there, and they can’t dispose of them.
I may be completely wrong but my impression is that IVF requires multiple medical appointments with the sort of timing that would make it difficult to travel too far - it’s one thing to travel 200 miles for a single appointment or even two appointments on consecutive days and quite another to have 7 appointments inside of two weeks and maybe need two or three or five rounds before it is successful.
The court ruled on state law grounds, so I don’t see a way for the US Supreme Court to overturn this. The “fix,” if there is going to be one, should come from the Alabama Legislature.
I don’t see how. The question is the proper interpretation of a particular term in a state statute. It doesn’t involve any obvious federal issues.
I’d even suggest that the interpretation of one term in one statute doesn’t necessarily implicate the definition of the same term in a different statute. The term “person” has a particularly varied set of meanings under various statutes.
I don’t think that logic holds. I mean, people breathe air and have names and embryos don’t, so they’re obviously not constrained by such petty comparisons.
