Alabama Supreme Court Cites the Bible in Terrifying Embryo Ruling

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Republican senator blocks bill to protect IVF

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., blocked the bill brought by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who used IVF to have her daughters.

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Republican senator blocks bill to protect IVF​

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., blocked the bill brought by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who used IVF to have her daughters.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., in Washington in 2022.Michael Brochstein / Sipa USA via AP file


Feb. 29, 2024, 12:29 AM EST

By Amanda Terkel and Brennan Leach

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi blocked passage of legislation Wednesday that would protect access to in vitro fertilization.

The measure, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and brought to the floor for consideration under unanimous consent — meaning one senator could block it from passage — would provide federal protections for IVF.

GOP senator blocks federal bill to protect IVF
FEB. 29, 2024 05:57

The Alabama state Supreme Court recent ly rul ed that embryos created through IVF are considered children.

Many doctors and families worry that IVF will become less available, because people theoretically could be sued for destroying embryos. During the IVF process, embryos are often discarded if they have genetic abnormalities or after patients decide they will not need to use them.

Since the court's decision, politicians in both parties have expressed support for protecting IVF.

Duckworth, who used IVF to have her two daughters, said the Alabama ruling “paints women like me and our doctors as criminals” and “throws IVF access into chaos as countless women and doctors try to figure out whether they might be criminalized for simply trying to create a family.”

She further called it a "nightmarish blend of hypocrisy and misogyny."

“The very people who claim to be defending family values are the ones trying to enact dystopian policies that would prevent Americans from starting their own families," she added.

In her objection, Hyde-Smith said the Alabama decision "did not ban IVF, nor has any state banned IVF."

"The bill before us today is a vast overreach that is full of poison pills that go way too far, far beyond ensuring legal access to IVF," she said.

Alabama families face uncertainty after Supreme Court IVF ruling
FEB. 28, 2024 03:35

A number of Republican politicians who say they believe life begins at conception or believe that an embryo or fetus deserves the full rights of a person have had to come out and explain their views on IVF — a type of fertility treatment that has not been a partisan issue.

In Alabama, legislators have been scramblingto come up with a fix to protect IVF practices in light of the high court's ruling there.

Democrats have leaned in on the issue politically; they've used it to hammer Republicans on abortion — an issue that has hurt the GOP in previous elections since conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

"This has always been about conservative politicians controlling women's bodies," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Wednesday. "This has been Donald Trump and the Republicans’ plan all along, and the opposition to Sen. Duckworth’s proposal today shows that Republicans are doubling down against reproductive freedom. They are coming for medication abortion, they are coming for birth control, and they are even coming for prenatal care. Make no mistake."


Amanda Terkel

 

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https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/12/anti-abortion-advocates-gop-ivf-00146369

HEALTH CARE

‘License to kill’: Anti-abortion groups rage against the GOP​

Some groups are running ads against longstanding GOP allies that use the same graphic imagery — blood, babies and scalpels — they have long deployed to oppose Democrats and the abortion-rights movement.

As many politicians raced in recent weeks to get to the right side of public opinion on IVF, some of the country’s biggest and most influential anti-abortion groups are pushing back. | Butch Dill/AP

By MEGAN MESSERLY and ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN

03/12/2024 05:02 AM EDT

The anti-abortion movement is turning on Republican lawmakers who support bills to protect in vitro fertilization, accusing them of sanctioning murder.

As many politicians raced in recent weeks to get to the right side of public opinion on IVF, some of the country’s biggest and most influential anti-abortion groups are pushing back.

Several have attacked state and federal lawmakers — who introduced legislation to protect IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children — for giving doctors a “license to kill” and said legislators’ efforts would result in “thousands of dead human beings.”

Other groups are going further, running ads against longstanding GOP allies that use the same graphic imagery — blood, babies and scalpels — they have long deployed to oppose Democrats and the abortion-rights movement.

The tension over IVF underscores a deepening divide as Republicans grapple with new political and policy consequences of passing laws declaring that life begins at conception. After marching in lockstep for decades against Roe v. Wade, conservatives are clashing in the post-Roe era over what it means to be “pro-life.”

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The split mirrors debates between Republicans and the anti-abortion movement over other popular policies, including exceptions from state abortion bans for rape and incest, and protections for contraception. That — and the unwillingness of many GOP candidates to talk about abortion on the campaign trail — has some in the anti-abortion movement accusing Republicans of caving to political pressure.

“For a lot of conservative Republican lawmakers, being against abortion has served as a kind of lazy way to say that you’re a conservative,” said Jameson Taylor, director of policy and legislative affairs for the Mississippi-based American Family Association Action. “Frankly, a lot of Republican lawmakers are not in touch with conservative principles because they have not taken sufficient time to think through what those principles are.”

In Alabama, the anti-abortion movement resoundingly condemned a bill shielding IVF providers from criminal and civil charges, and pressured GOP Gov. Kay Ivey to veto it. When she signed it anyway, one anti-abortion organization said the new law “disrespects human life and strips human beings of their dignity,” and another ran digital ads against Ivey and Republican lawmakers using graphic imagery and accusing them of “[betraying] life.”

“Politicians cannot call themselves pro-life, affirm the truth that human life begins at the moment of fertilization and then enact laws that allow the callous killing of these preborn children simply because they were created through IVF,” Live Action president Lila Rose said after Alabama Republicans approved the legislation.

A spokesperson for Ivey did not directly respond when asked about the group’s comments that the governor had given doctors a “license to kill.” Instead, the spokesperson pointed back to a statement the governor issued after signing the legislation, in which Ivey reiterated her support for IVF, lauded legislators for “quickly tackling” the issue and touted Alabama as a “pro-life, pro-family state.”

In Mississippi, the anti-abortion movement and its GOP allies have called a Republican-backed proposal to protect IVF the “greatest assault on the cause of life that we’ve seen in Mississippi in a long time” and warned that the “bad Democrat-based bill” would lead to “backdoor abortion and possible cloning and selling of ‘genetic materials of humans.’”

Lawmakers in Kentucky and Missouri who have introduced similar bills are also getting pushback from local conservative groups who see the legislation as an end-run around the state’s abortion restrictions.

Republican governors defend IVF after Alabama ruling
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Some Republicans dismiss the criticism, arguing that protecting IVF is a “pro-life” position.

“I’ve had some negative comments from extreme pro-life type folks,” said Missouri state Rep. Bill Allen, a Republican who has introduced pro-IVF legislation. “But I’m pro-life. This is bringing life into the world. I think there’s something to be said for that.”

In Congress, anti-abortion groups are vowing to penalize GOP members if they support pro-IVF bills they believe go too far, including a nonbinding resolution introduced by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) earlier this month. And speakers, including the head of the influential Heritage Foundation, told activists at a recent anti-abortion summit in Washington, D.C., that Republicans have proved themselves “a fickle ally in the fight for the unborn” since the Dobbs decision, and can’t be relied upon to advance their agenda.

“Republicans — those who claim to be pro-life — have to be consistent in that viewpoint, and not run from that conversation,” Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, told POLITICO.

Yet the divide over IVF does not mean anti-abortion groups are breaking with the GOP entirely. This week, leaders of two of the country’s biggest groups — Susan B. Anthony List and March for Life — will attend House Republicans’ annual policy retreat. And even the groups most upset over the wave of pro-IVF legislation won’t commit to primarying the bills’ supporters, telling POLITICO they’d rather “educate” them on the issue.

Still, many anti-abortion advocates are stressing to lawmakers that blanket support for IVF, which recent polling shows is supported by 86 percent of voters, is not a nuanced “pro-life” position, arguing that the state and federal bills introduced to protect fertility care amount to “a get-out-of-regulation-free card.”

Instead, they want lawmakers to seize the moment created by the Alabama decision to impose restrictions on the way IVF is commonly practiced in the U.S. — in which excess fertilized embryos are created to ensure the best chance of a successful pregnancy after which unused embryos are often destroyed.

“Saying that you support IVF doesn’t mean anything unless we talk about what IVF is,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief policy strategist for Students for Life of America. “Do you support allowing a clinic that allows another patient to wander back and destroy embryos to go without any sanctions? Do you support allowing a disreputable doctor who uses his own sperm to fertilize most of the women’s eggs in the facility — that person shouldn’t experience any repercussions? What exactly are you saying you support?”

Most GOP lawmakers are ducking those questions as they instead push legislation to broadly protect access to the procedure in states like Kentucky, Mississippi and Missouri. Legislators in those states said they are open to a longer-term conversation about changes to the IVF process, but that their short-term concern is ensuring that access is unimpeded.

“I personally have concerns about discarding embryos. I believe that is the destruction of life,” said Kentucky state Sen. Whitney Westerfield, a Republican, who has introduced legislation to protect IVF access. His son and the triplets his wife is pregnant with are the product of adopted embryos another family did not use. “But I don’t want to create a weird incentive structure to reduce the use of IVF or to limit the opportunity for kids like mine to be born.”

Still, some Republicans lawmakers are heeding the anti-abortion movement’s concerns. In Iowa, House GOP lawmakers voted last week to advance legislation that would give embryos and fetuses personhood rights, despite concerns from Democrats and others that the legislation would hamper IVF access. And GOP lawmakers in Tennessee recently rejected legislation proposed by their Democratic colleagues to protect IVF access, saying that such legislation was unnecessary.

Even the Alabama Legislature watered down its original proposal, which would have carved out embryos created during the IVF process but not implanted into the uterus from the definition of “human life.”

“They’re not unafraid of the anti-abortion movement,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in abortion rights. “If they were, this bill would have looked different.”

As the debate rages at the state and national levels, Perkins and other anti-abortion leaders say they’re hopeful, despite recent setbacks, that the conversation ignited by the Alabama ruling will eventually lead to more restrictions on IVF.

“The silver lining here is that it’s drawing attention to something that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention,” he said. “More policymakers will begin to look at this and say, ‘Hey, you know? That this is something that really does need some oversight.’ I think they’ll wind up in a place different than the Alabama Legislature.”

• FILED UNDER:
• ABORTION,
• KAY IVEY,
• ALABAMA,
• ABORTION RIGHTS,
• ANTI-ABORTION GROUPS
  

 

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How 'fetal personhood' in Alabama's IVF ruling evolved from fringe to mainstream​

MARCH 14, 20245:01 AM ET

Odette Yousef


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Alabama's state capitol in Montgomery, Ala. earlier this year

Andi Rice/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Alabama Supreme Court's decision that frozen embryos have the same rights as children came as a surprise even to many who oppose abortion rights. But for researchers and activists who have long tracked narratives at the most extreme end of the anti-abortion movement, this legal determination was inevitable.

They say it shows how, even as the pro-abortion rights movement focuses on preserving legal access to abortion and contraception, other laws that codify the once-fringe notion of "legal personhood" may more immediately underpin decisions that could drastically curtail reproductive rights.

"The movement that's referred to as 'personhood,' to indicate that life begins at conception, was always going here," said Alex DiBranco, executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.

DiBranco said that while IVF may be popular among Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, hardline conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Live Action have long villainized the IVF industry. Often referring to it as the "big fertility" industrial complex, they characterize the sector as predatory and profit-driven.

"They talk a lot about the idea that it's eugenics, that it's really more about designer babies than actually supporting women or other people who have fertility needs," DiBranco said.

At its most extreme, reproductive rights researchers and advocates warn that states where fetal personhood is established could even see courts citing those laws in criminal cases where pregnant people are concerned. They say the door to this application was opened decades ago when the American public succumbed to widespread hysteria over so-called "crack babies."

A moral panic normalizes a fringe idea​

In 1973, when the Supreme Court issued its decision on Roe v. Wade, the notion that fetuses or embryos were full rights-bearing humans under the law was not widely popular.

"Immediately in the days after that decision, there were proposals to codify some form of fetal personhood," said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director at Pregnancy Justice, an organization that provides legal defense services to pregnant people in civil and criminal cases. "It did not gain traction until ... the late 80s and early 90s. And that was when the war on drugs was on a collision course with the war on abortion."

Sussman and others say that it was the moral panic over so-called "crack babies" that took the idea of fetal personhood from fringe to mainstream. At the time, there were widespread fears that prenatal use of crack cocaine could lead to children who might grow to have a number of problems. The narrative contained classic moral panic tropes: children in utero as helpless victim; and a scapegoat that garnered little sympathy within the American public at the time, namely poor, African-American women who used drugs.

Several states passed laws that allowed women to be charged with criminal child abuse for exposing their fetuses to illicit substances during pregnancy. These resulted in hundreds of women being jailed in connection with their pregnancies. Just as significantly, the laws also entrenched the concept of fetal personhood into state criminal codes.

"It was a political opportunity for the anti-abortion movement, through the fears of and the hysteria surrounding the 'crack baby' epidemic," said Sussman.

In the years since then, studies show that children born to mothers who used crack cocaine while pregnant carry no significant difference in their life outcomes when compared with other children. Nonetheless, the exploitation of the fear at the time was potent. It opened the door to charging women with crimes against their own pregnancies. It also shifted popular opinion on the concept of fetal personhood. A 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 56% of Americans believe that "human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights."

A wave of fetal personhood bills​

In Alabama, Sussman said the path toward the IVF decision had been cleared at least a decade earlier. In 2013, the state's Supreme Court ruled that fetuses are considered children in criminal cases concerning prenatal exposure to controlled substances.

"So this has been the creep, and it started primarily in criminal law," said Sussman. "And it has extended to the law that was at issue in the Alabama Supreme Court [on frozen embryos] ... which is a civil law that now impacts IVF and fetal personhood."

Those who have followed these developments closely say this cascade of small shifts has been tragic to watch.

"I wish we cared when it was impoverished women who were being locked up," said Grace Howard, associate professor of Justice Studies at San Jose State University.

"I'm glad that people are outraged about [the IVF ruling]. They should be outraged about this," she said. "But damn, if they had been this pissed off a decade ago, I don't think that we would be where we are right now because it would have stopped this creep from happening."

According to Pregnancy Justice, at least 11 states currently have laws broadly defining fetal personhood. In those states, these definitions could interplay broadly with civil and criminal codes. But it notes that all states have case law or statutes that, in some area, designate fetuses as a "person," "minor" or "child."

"There are personhood laws that exist in multiple states around the country that are not being effectuated to their full extent," said Sussman. "The concern that we have here is that, whether it's prosecutors [or] whether it's litigants, will start to use those laws to criminalize self managing abortion, criminalize pregnancy loss, criminalize behavior during pregnancy, go after IVF in the way that we saw in this civil case or criminally, too. ... And so that is sort of the sleeping threat that lingers in a lot of these states."

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 13 states currently have personhood bills under consideration, from Alaska to Illinois to Massachusetts. While much of the concern currently centers on how these may be used in relation to IVF services, Howard warns that the ramifications could extend far beyond, to the people who are, themselves, pregnant.

"The way I see it, once any element of this is criminalized or once the fetus is defined as a person in any area of law, criminalization is the next step and it is not hard to do," she said.