Abortion rights
The Alabama Supreme Court decision last month determining that frozen embryos have the same rights as children brought the personhood debate to a surreal level that should terrify anyone who supports the right to terminate a pregnancy or start one in a lab through in vitro fertilization.
It was a preposterous ruling — three couples whose frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic were found to have the right to sue for wrongful death. But it is an example of the growing anti-abortion effort to redefine embryos — in utero and in laboratory dishes — and fetuses as people with the 14th Amendment right of equal protection under the law.
It’s all part of the chaos over reproductive rights that has engulfed the country since the Supreme Court took away the constitutional right to an abortion in June 2022, and conservative states rushed new and horrible restrictions into law. Now conservative anti-abortion politicians and their supporters have finally found out what it’s like to have a court interfere with their reproductive freedom.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Alabama quickly passed a bill Thursday to protect in vitro fertilization providers from criminal and civil liability — some clinics halted procedures after the ruling. It wasn’t a victory for reproductive rights, however, just a stop-gap measure that will be obliterated if the personhood movement gains more traction in state legislatures.
Since Roe vs. Wade was overturned, more than a dozen states have introduced personhood bills bestowing legal rights upon fetuses or embryos, or both. Legislators in Iowa and Colorado have introduced bills that would define personhood as beginning at fertilization and subject to the state’s homicide, wrongful death and assault laws — with no IVF exceptions.
Last week, after the Alabama decision, lawmakers in Florida shelved a bill that protected “unborn ” children from wrongful death. But it likely will return in some form.
And 18 members of the U.S. Senate and 166 members of the U.S. House co-sponsored legislation in 2021 that would have conferred equal rights under the 14th Amendment to a fertilized egg. The bills have gone nowhere, but that could change depending on the outcome of the election in November.
A number of personhood laws are already on the books. A Georgia law called the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act declares a fetus a person after six weeks of pregnancy and bans abortion after that point. Louisiana has a law specifically preventing the destruction of embryos.
Abortion foes have been trying to shift the storyline, with a slew of new state laws, from punishing pregnant women to championing innocent fetuses, which is an easier sell to the public. Even Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker, in his concurrence, waxed on about how “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
This move toward declaring fetuses and embryos people with legal rights is all the more reason we need a federal law protecting the right to abortion. The decisions that voters make this year in elections will have enormous implications for how much bodily autonomy women are allowed, and could set a course for a dystopian future where their rights are trumped by the rights of their embryos.