Alabama’s IVF court ruling: The GOP’s spiral into fanaticism
Since its inception the anti-abortion movement has employed various sentimental and pseudo-scientific phrases that promote the illusion that tiny blastocysts and the fetuses they become are children whose helpless status requires our limitless compassion. This notion of “fetal personhood” was most recently exemplified by the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said frozen embryos are people.
This anti-abortion rhetoric has always aimed at portraying its adversaries as perversely indifferent to life itself. Mike Pence, for example, unlike the abortion rights advocates, will “advance the cause of life,” while Donald Trump waxes eloquent about “always being on the side of the Miracle of Life.”
For many years the media have shown a timid deference to this manipulative and saccharine language that sacralizes the fetus while risking the lives of the women who carry them. But now, a golden opportunity to break the spell of the pro-life language has arrived. The medical consequences of the widely ridiculed Alabama ruling and the shocking medical cruelties that have been reported since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that there is no constitutional right to abortion have finally exposed the dark side of the anti-abortion incantations about preborn babies.
There are two reasons to question the motives of the “pro-life” crusaders. The first is their refusal to acknowledge the medical cruelties inflicted on pregnant women who are forced to carry dead or nonviable fetuses to term. The second is their sponsorship of ritual punishments acted out in public venues for women seeking abortions. These spectacles are presented as legal threats and civicminded ordeals that abortion-seeking women deserve.
Threats to bring murder charges against women are one of them. The Idaho Republican Party calls abortion “murder from the moment of fertilization.” Kentucky’s abortion law would make abortion after genetic counseling
Relentless publicizing of the party’s sadistic treatment of pregnant women could make the difference.
or the destruction of IVF embryos subject to a charge of capital murder.
Two Republicans have proposed “rape panels” that revive the “Scarlet Letter” tradition of female humiliation. These are members of the community who interrogate the female victim to determine whether she really has been raped and is, therefore, entitled to an abortion.
But the most bizarre punishment of all was proposed by then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in 2016. This plan would have required all fetal tissue and blood, whether from an abortion or a miscarriage, to be conveyed to a hospital or clinic and then cremated or buried by a funeral home. Grieving mothers were to be sent on a forced march through a ceremonial process they did not choose and that many could not afford.
The medically disastrous high court decisions are the turning point that humane physicians and policymakers have been waiting for. They mark an opportunity to drive home the point that Donald Trump’s misogynistic and punitive instincts now drive Republican Party policy, and that is why Republican positions on abortion are hardening even in the wake of the redstate abortion referendums they have recently lost. The GOP’s downward spiral into fanaticism is the Democratic Party’s greatest asset in the 2024 election. Relentless publicizing of the party’s sadistic treatment of pregnant women could make the difference.
Hoberman is a medical historian who teaches at The University of Texas and is the author of “Black & Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism” (2012).