My understanding is that most of the hard-core antiabortion right don’t object to IVF per se (there are some). But they are deeply wedded to a conviction that life begins at conception and that the fetus or embryo has rights as a legal person. This leads them to, at a minimum, oppose the destruction of embryos created through IVF and potentially also their long-term storage as a violation of those embryos’ human rights.
As @Stratocaster and @Gyrate note, there are potentially ways you could address this such as only creating as many embryos as you could implant each cycle. But this would make the process insanely more expensive and less effective, open patients and practitioners up to new legal labilities, and create terrible ethical quandaries (must a doctor implant an embryo with a nonviable genetic condition?). De facto, it would greatly restrict access to the procedure.
And so, the political dilemma for the GOP is how to square the convictions of their hardcore antiabortion voters (who aren’t going to just drop this) with the overwhelming public support for accessible IVF. So far GOP lawmakers have been taking refuge in wishy-washy rhetoric about supporting IVF, but eventually they’re going to get forced into making policy decisions.
Ironically, some of the rhetoric that the GOP wants to “ban IVF” may help them out. If they can frame the argument as being between “banning IVF” and doing nothing, that makes restrictions such as a ban on destroying embryos seem like a reasonable middle ground. They can puff up their chest about how they would NEVER allow anyone to ban such a vital procedure to so many families. Rather than such an extreme outcome, they only support a few common-sense guardrails to address ethical concerns within the industry. Even though the whole “debate” over IVF is one they created out of whole cloth.
I guess partly they are just stalling at this point.
I think there is considerable overlap between the “life begins at conception” and “IVF helps nice couples have families” crowds, and the way such people square the circle is frankly that they’d never thought about it before or were ignorant of how IVF works.
The GOP just wants to know what direction will please their audience and works best rhetorically…there was never any principle here.
Apart from a few characters like Mike Johnson. He’s right there among the religious right experiencing cognitive dissonance.
But eventually yeah, they’ll think of some “important” distinction, like “mother’s expectation” or whatever. And I expect them to go on the offensive, claiming that anyone that doesn’t agree that this distinction is fundamental is the true hypocrite.
They’ll have trouble if they pick “mother’s expectation.” What if the mother’s expectation is that she doesn’t expect to be pregnant? (And, if she’s planning to get an abortion, that certainly is her expectation.)
“Mother’s expectation” might be what the left settles on (which could be coupled with a presumption that a person who is pregnant would expect to carry a pregnancy to term unless the evidence clearly demonstrates otherwise), but it will never be what the right settles on. Not as a blanket distinction, anyway.
That would imply that a woman’s choice (her expectation) should matter. It’s by disregarding women’s choices that the right got us here in the first place.
What dilemma? You guys sure do build up straw men. The court ruling weeks ago noted the explicit carve out in the homicide statute for extrauterine “unborn children”, and the lack of such a carve out in the wrongful death statute. It was only a matter of time before that got fixed.
Which it did, by the way. March 6, within two weeks of the original court ruling. Frozen embryos are still children in Alabama, but the wrongful death statute no longer applies in relation to IVF.
There are still lingering concerns. Some clinics are scared that the the 2018 constitutional amendment, which does not distinguish in vitro from in vivo, is self executing (I don’t think it is - it merely declares Alabama’s “public policy”, while other amendments explicitly say they are self executing). Some lawmakers want to regulate IVF differently, or provide a way for people to bring wrongful death actions when a clinic maliciously/recklessly destroys embryos.
Maybe I was not clear enough in the point I was making.
The Left doesn’t need to settle on anything here. It’s the (American) Right that has a clearly contradictory position.
And of course the MAGA Right can be hypocrites on many topics, but this time, with enshrining absolutism into law, it’s impossible not to address it, directly or indirectly.
I used the term “mother’s expectation” because that’s how it was referred to upthread. We could just call it “expectation”. It’s nothing to do with choice.
It might mean though that women with non viable pregnancies, at least find that they are allowed abortions. If this is the logic that conservative States go with.
Right, they’re saying embryos have civil rights and it’s unfortunate if any embryonic kids were killed, but only those killed deliberately will have their day in court? Otherwise oopsie?
As near as I can tell, they’re also saying it’s OK to kill them deliberately – but only as part of the normal IVF procedures. So you can deliberately kill a blastocyst in the lab, but mustn’t deliberately kill a blastocyst that’s in a woman’s body. And both the blastocyst in the lab and the one in a uterus are children.
So a follow-up question: have the IVF clinics in Alabama announced that it’s business as normal, in light of the statutory amendment?
I understand the points that @Flurb and @Max_S are making, but I’m curious if the IVF clinics are reassured by the amendments or still think there is cause for concern? They’re the ones who have the most at stake in this situation.
The new law explicitly makes an individual providing or receiving IVF services immune from civil and criminal liability for the death of an embryo. This partially supersedes the previous wrongful death of a minor statute, which a court held to impose civil liability for the death of an embryo. It does not supersede the court’s statutory interpretation of the term “minor child” so as to include extrauterine embryos.
If, for example, one who is neither receiving nor providing IVF services were to destroy embryos, I would argue they are still liable under the wrongful death of a minor statute.
Since the Alabama legislature’s website is unreliable, here is a mirror link to the new law. It is very short.
Does this mean the Alabama state legislature could, say, exempt people from being prosecuted for murder if their victim is black, or gay, or Muslim, or trans, or a Democrat, or some other category? If not, what makes a fetus special? I thought they were the same as a person, according to Alabama state law.
In those circumstances the ACLU would bring (and win) an equal protection suit via section 1983. I admit, I haven’t read anything about giving embryos 14th Amendment rights in Alabama.
Personally I would argue that Alabama doesn’t get to decide who is or is not a person for the purposes of respecting federal rights. That’s for the Supreme Court to decide since the federal constitution doesn’t define “person”. I would argue that the federal constitution doesn’t recognize embryos as people and, while Alabama is free to give embryos extra rights at the state level if it so wishes, it is not obliged to treat them as people for 14th Amendment purposes.
Likewise, the IRS isn’t obliged to give you tax deductions for each embryo. etc. Federal authorities do not have to respect idiosyncratic definitions of “person” under state law.