Ala. IVF ruling opens a new front in abortion battle
Decision splits GOP as Dems pounce on election-year issue
An Alabama Supreme Court ruling, that frozen embryos should be considered children, has created a new political nightmare for Republicans nationally who distanced themselves from a fringe view about reproductive health that threatened to drive away voters in November.
Several Republican governors and lawmakers swiftly disavowed the decision, made by a GOP-majority court, expressing support for in vitro fertilization treatments. Some spoke out about their personal experiences with infertility. Others declared that they would not support federal restrictions on IVF, drawing a distinction between their support for broadly popular fertility treatments and their opposition to abortion.
“The concern for years has been that IVF would be taken away from women everywhere,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said Thursday. “We need to do everything we can to protect women’s access in every state to IVF.”
Yet, even as some Republicans backed away from the court decision, Republican legislators in conservative states planned efforts to push bills that would declare that life begins at conception — a policy that could have severe consequences for fertility treatments.
Others acted to protect IVF.
Tim Melson, a Republican state senator in Alabama, said he plans to introduce legislation clarifying that embryos are not viable until they are implanted in a woman’s uterus.
The division is a new twist on a familiar problem for the party. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade, many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have tried to avoid the issue of abortion and reframe their proposals — like a 15-week federal ban — as common-sense policies that can appeal to moderate voters.
But such efforts have repeatedly been undercut by their conservative Christian allies in statehouses who saw the fall of federal abortion rights as the beginning of efforts to ban the procedure and related reproductive medical care.
Despite the party’s attempt to control its message, that dynamic is likely to play on repeat. The elimination of federal abortion rights returned abortion policy to the states, empowering a broad collection of state lawmakers and judges to address thorny questions about the intimate details of conception, pregnancy and birth.
The Alabama court ruled Feb. 16 that embryos made by fertility treatments and stored in a medical facility should be considered children under the state’s law that governs harmful death. The decision was relatively narrow, applying to a specific case in which three couples sued a clinic for inadvertently dropping and destroying their embryos.
But anti-abortion activists, who for years have pushed for a fertilized egg to be considered a person, saw the decision as progress toward accepting fetal personhood and even granting an embryo equality rights under the 14th Amendment.
Jason Rapert, a Republican former Arkansas state legislator and president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, said his group planned to discuss potential IVF model legislation at its meeting in June. They are already pushing bills in state legislatures that would declare that life begins at conception.
“We’re very happy,” said Rapert, whose organization actively promotes what it calls “Biblical principles” through model legislation. “This decision is really big. It further affirms that life begins at conception.”
Democrats have seized on Republican division to fuel their election efforts, hoping restrictions passed by states will mobilize their voters and turn moderates and independents against Republicans. Campaigning Thursday in Michigan, Vice President Kamala Harris called the court decision “shocking” but “not surprising,” given the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The Alabama ruling “is part of their suicide pact,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat. “This is done in a Republican state with Republican judges. It’s baked now as part of the Republican narrative. It’s absolutely baked. They can’t run from this.”
Nikki Haley, who frequently calls for Republicans to “find consensus” on abortion as she campaigns for president, struggled to address the ruling. On Wednesday, Haley said she believed that embryos created through IVF “are babies,” citing her own experience of conceiving her son through artificial insemination — a process that does not involve the creation of embryos outside a woman’s body.
After facing blowback, Haley clarified her comments hours later. “Alabama needs to go back and look at the law,” she said in an interview with CNN, casting the case as an issue of parental rights, not the question of when life begins. “We don’t want fertility treatments to shut down.”
On Friday, Trump said he would “strongly support the availability of IVF” and called on lawmakers in Alabama to preserve access to the procedure.
But other Republicans tried to avoid the topic.
On Thursday, many declined to comment on the ruling, including House
Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who has put his faith at the forefront of his politics throughout his career and has called abortion “an American holocaust.”
His home state, Louisiana, has a law that prevents the intentional destruction of embryos.
Republican strategists have advised candidates to shy away from the most aggressive abortion restrictions and avoid long-standing labels like “pro-life,” which they say have become synonymous with banning abortion. They’ve also urged candidates to proactively declare their support for other areas of reproductive health care, including fertility treatments and contraception.
Still, in Congress, a small group of far-right members continues to push for antiabortion measures that their colleagues in competitive districts want to distance themselves from.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., told reporters Thursday at CPAC, a conference of conservative activists, that he believed embryos are children because “embryos grow into being adults, like we are.” But he also said there are “women who have decided to seek that process,” referring to IVF, adding: “And that’s a good thing.”
While polling has shown broad support for abortion rights, there’s less data available about views on fertility treatments.
The Pew Research Center found in September that 61% of Americans and 54% of Republicans believe health insurance should cover the cost of fertility treatments. The services are widely used: About 42% of Americans said they or someone they know had used some form of fertility treatment to have a baby.
Haley and Trump have cautioned against an absolute national abortion ban.