Now they’ve come for IVF

Hello, IVF parent here.

I have something to tell you, in case you’re not familiar with the miseries of infertility, or if you’re a Christian zealot sitting on a supreme court bench in Alabama, and looking for excuses to impose absolute dominion over every uterus in the country.

Embryos — those collections of cells invisible to the naked eye, the ones that form when medical professionals grow a fertilized egg in a lab? Yeah, they’re not actual children.

I remember the gray images of those cells from my own cycles, some 17 years ago: So many groups of stout little circles pressed up against each other; eight in this one, five in that, irregular and mysterious, all but one of them dead ends. Seeing those images was just one more step in a grueling, soul-crushing process that included endless tests, countless self-administered injections, surgical intervention, and mountains of wishing and waiting. The waiting was the worst.

I was desperate to be pregnant. But no amount of longing could make those cells my children.

As everyone who has lived through a failed IVF cycle knows, there is a vast and painful chasm between an embryo and a viable pregnancy. Those little circles are lottery tickets, not jackpots. And for those judges in Alabama to suggest otherwise is both enraging and terrifying.

The case they decided on Feb. 16 sprang from the immense pain of several couples who had gone through fertility treatments, and whose frozen embryos were destroyed by an intruder in a Mobile facility in 2020. The plaintiffs could claim greater damages if the frozen embryos counted as actual children. Among the judges in the 7-2 majority who supported that fiction, the decision of the chief justice was particularly chilling: “Life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” he wrote, trampling what remains of the Establishment Clause.

The decision shut down much of IVF in Alabama within days, stranding patients. Fertility treatments destroy embryos all the time: They are discarded for being of poor quality and damaged and rendered unusable in the normal course of a cycle; the people for whom they are produced and frozen often elect to donate them to research, or, simply to stop storing them. Under this ruling, all of that could open those involved to lawsuits and criminal charges. So Alabama, a state that has all but completely banned abortion because it is supposedly so pro-life, has now effectively shut down a method responsible for tens of thousands of births each year.

It makes no sense, until you realize this decision is part of a huge effort to restrict every choice people make when it comes to reproduction — all the way from contraception through abortion and fertility treatments. The 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturning a constitutional right to abortion opened the door for all of it.

“The Dobbs decision was the midpoint in the strategy, it is not the end,” said Rebecca Hart Holder, head of Reproductive Equity Now. “They want to turn back the clock by decades.”

The US Supreme Court is considering a case that could shut down access to abortion pills even in pro-choice states like Massachusetts. And the zealots in Alabama are among many trying to establish fetal personhood, which could shut down abortion everywhere.

Some Republicans have tried to distance themselves from the Alabama decision, divining that it might hurt them politically.

But they can’t walk away from their own legislative efforts to end IVF. Or from the fact that Christian nationalists have taken over the GOP, and are trying to impose their retrograde values on us all.

Here’s a tweet from the Heritage Foundation – the think tank that mirrors GOP policy – from just last year: “Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”

Now there’s a winning platform — an end to recreational sex. These throwbacks want to take us – and women in particular — back to the 1950s. And they’re more than happy to use the pain of people longing for children to do so.

If hell exists, it has a special corner reserved for those who inflict hurt on those who are already suffering — and who do it in God’s name.