#extrauterine children

[memenewsdotcom]

Alabama protects IVF clinics

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

[Alternate Text:

Alabama supreme court rules frozen embryos are ‘children’

Court allows two wrongful death suits against fertility clinic to proceed while decision could impact people seeking IVF.]

absolutely horrifying news coming out of alabama.

the whole article is a terrifying but worthwhile read, but i wanna highlight two passages from it which are just absolutely fucking horrifying.

[Alternate Text:

Alabama supreme court justice Jay Mitchell wrote that embryos are indeed protected under the state’s existing law: “The central question presented in these consolidated appeals, which involve the death of embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, is whether the act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children – that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed,” he wrote. “Under existing black-letter law, the answer to that question is no: the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”]

[Alternate Text:

The Alabama supreme court’s ruling repeatedly references God and the sanctity of life, citing the Bible and biblical scholars including Petrus van Mastricht, Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. Chief Justice Thomas Parker wrote: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself … this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life – that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”]

[mariacallous]

Earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court issued an opinion, complete with a wildly theocratic concurrence from Chief Justice Thomas Parker, that functionally outlawed in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state.

In the wake of the ruling, Republicans have tried to unwind this mess, with the Alabama legislature considering passing a law to ensure IVF access and Donald Trump coming out to say he strongly supports access to IVF. 

All of this is a bit of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as the damage is done. The entire spectacle was inevitable once the GOP gave the party over to anti-choice zealots decades ago.

In brief, the reason the Alabama Supreme Court’s opinion implicates and outlaws IVF is that the state has a Wrongful Death of a Minor statute, and the court decided this applies to “all unborn children, without limitation.” But there’s no language in the statute that says this. Rather, it’s just that over the last 15 years, the Alabama Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings saying that the undefined term “minor child” in the statute can be stretched to “unborn children” regardless of what state of development the embryo is at. Once the court created such an expansive definition, the decision that frozen embryos are people was inescapable. 

To be fair, though, the Alabama Supreme Court is entirely made up of conservative Republicans, they were a bit hamstrung in their decision. Alabama’s state constitution states that ��it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate." But that doesn’t necessarily mean the court was required to, as it did here, extend that “unborn child” definition to what it calls “extrauterine children” — embryos frozen by people pursuing IVF. 

That IVF is even controversial is an indictment of the GOP

An IVF cycle is designed to produce multiple eggs that can be retrieved in one procedure. The more eggs produced, the greater the likelihood of a viable embryo that can be implanted, hopefully resulting in a pregnancy. Because of this, multiple embryos often remain, and people freeze those for several reasons. People may use them if the first attempt at implantation doesn’t work, thus avoiding multiple egg retrieval cycles. They may save them for later if they decide to have more children. They may donate them to other people struggling with fertility issues. 

For people not saddled with the misguided anti-choice belief that a tiny clump of cells is the same as a person, this is a non-controversial process. It enhances the chance of pregnancy and allows people to plan for future children without undergoing multiple invasive egg retrieval cycles. But if one subscribes to the notion of fetal personhood — that a fetus is quite literally a person, with all the attendant privileges that confers — then those frozen embryos are the same as babies. 

This is, of course, a religious, not scientific belief. Chief Justice Parker, in his concurring opinion, made clear that his vote, at least, stems directly from his religious beliefs rather than being grounded in the law. Citing Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, the Ten Commandments, and the King James Bible, Parker concludes that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Notably, none of those things are legal precedent. Indeed, in a country founded on the separation of church and state, they shouldn’t inform a court holding. However, since religious conservatives dominate the US Supreme Court, that separation has largely collapsed. This has emboldened conservative litigants and conservative state and federal judges to take ever more anti-choice stances. 

Reproductive health activists have been sounding the alarm about the anti-choice attacks on IVF for years, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. At least two prominent anti-choice groups, Americans United for Life and Students for Life, have railed against IVF. The chief legal officer for Americans United for Life, Steve Aden, called IVF “eugenics” and said that IVF created “embryonic human beings” that were destroyed in the process. Students for Life called IVF “damaging and destructive.”

These same anti-choice groups also hate birth control, and the Dobbs decision paved the way for them to mount a theocratic attack on it too. Christopher Rufo, who ginned up a panic over benign diversity initiatives and helped force out the first Black president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has already telegraphed that this is his next attack.

Over on Elon Musk’s increasingly Nazi-fied social media site, X, Rufo is spewing rhetoric about how “the family structure disintegrated precisely as access to birth control proliferated” and that recreational sex is bad and leads to single-mother households. 

Rufo isn’t alone. The Heritage Foundation, which is also busy with a blueprint for a second Trump presidency that would destroy the administrative state and whose leader is still pushing the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election, has also called for the end of birth control. Also over on X, Heritage’s official account posted last year that “a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and … returning the consequentiality to sex.”

And there you have it. Religious conservatives are calling for a return to a world where sex isn’t recreational or for pleasure but is instead fraught with consequences — namely, pregnancies that can’t be terminated even when the pregnant person’s life is in danger. To do this, however, they would need to succeed in getting the Supreme Court to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated restrictions on birth control. 

More importantly, Griswold affirmed the constitutional right to privacy. It’s that right that not only underpinned the right to an abortion in Roe but also underpins other cases related to the rights of Americans to pursue sexual and marital relationships without government interference. In Lawrence v. Texas, decided in 2003, the Supreme Court relied upon Griswold to throw out laws that criminalized sexual contact between members of the same sex. Twelve years later, that same reasoning was used in Obergefell v. Hodges to affirm a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. 

Justice Clarence Thomas hates the right to privacy and has made no secret he wants it gone. In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, he called on the Court to “reconsider” all these cases and overrule them as “demonstrably erroneous.” Justice Samuel Alito has been a bit more evasive about this, writing in Dobbs that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” However, Alito’s Dobbs opinion is littered with references to “fetal life” and how abortion destroys an “unborn human being.” As recently as last week, Alito wrote a statement decrying Obergefell because he doesn’t think it’s fair that people who are bigots about same-sex marriage ever get called bigots. 

It isn’t just Thomas and Alito. During her confirmation hearing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett refused to say whether she thought Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell were rightly decided. In 2012, she signed an open letter stating that the Affordable Care Act’s required coverage for birth control was an assault on religious liberty. Similarly, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his confirmation hearing, also wouldn’t say whether Griswold was correctly decided. Justice Neil Gorsuch did the same. 

That makes five likely votes — with Chief Justice John Roberts a possible sixth — for a rollback of privacy rights in America. With that pillar of law gone, states would be free to outlaw same-sex marriage, get rid of birth control, and impose any other theocratic conditions they’d like. 

The dog that caught the car

Right now, Republicans are scrambling to undo the damage they’ve wrought, realizing that an anti-IVF stance is alienating to most. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that 42 percent of adults had used fertility treatments or knew someone who had. From 1996 to 2018, over 1 million babies were born as a result of fertility treatments. Mike Pence has spoken publicly about how he and his wife used IVF and that the procedure should be protected. 

In Alabama, Republican legislators are planning to introduce a law that would say the embryo isn’t a person until implanted in a uterus. But legislation doesn’t trump the state constitution, which means the Alabama courts could throw out any law they deem contrary to their fetal personhood interpretation of the constitution. Several Alabama fertility clinics have stopped IVF services, citing the legal risk. The state’s GOP attorney general, Steve Marshall, said he wouldn’t use the decision to prosecute IVF providers or people seeking IVF treatment, but that’s a slender reed to rely upon. What provider or patient wants to rely upon the vague assurances of the attorney general rather than a law that protects access?

And it isn’t just IVF. Elected officials in states that have banned abortion have openly mocked those people who have come forward with horror stories of being refused abortions even as they developed sepsis or faced the possibility of permanent future infertility. Doctors have no clear guidance on when they can terminate a pregnancy to save the life of the pregnant person, leaving them vulnerable to prosecution. People who currently have frozen embryos have no idea what to do with them, and nor do clinics. If the hardest-line anti-choice people get their way, access to birth control will become as spotty and politicized as access to abortion is now. 

This type of amorphous fear is a feature, not a bug, of the post-Dobbs landscape. When the entire spectrum of reproductive health is murky, and the threat of prosecution looms large, doctors won’t perform abortions or IVF treatments. Patients won’t seek abortions even as their health deteriorates to a level that could result in death. People who can get pregnant will have their lives narrowed to nearly nothing as they try to sidestep the landmines of an ever-shifting jurisprudence over their bodies. 

And that’s exactly the way conservatives want it, no matter their current feeble attempts to get out from under an IVF disaster of their own making. The GOP made common cause with the worst people in the country on this issue, and now we’re all stuck with the consequences. 

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Carter Sherman at The Guardian:

In the year Roe v Wade was overturned, at least 200 people in the US were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies – the highest number of cases in a single year ever recorded, according to a new report released on Tuesday. The report, compiled by the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, is the first comprehensive accounting of pregnancy-related criminal charges between June 2022 and June 2023, but researchers warn that it is still probably an undercount.

[...] The vast majority of prosecutions documented in the report do not involve abortions. However, five cases mention allegations of an abortion, an attempted abortion, or “researching or exploring the possibility of an abortion”, according to the report. Only one was charged under a statute meant to criminalize abortions. The rest involved a bevy of other laws, such as a statute that bans the “abuse of a corpse”. Four of those cases took place in states that ban abortion or are hostile to the procedure. More than 200 of the 210 recorded prosecutions involve allegations of substance use during pregnancy. In almost 200 of the cases, prosecutors charged people using statutes that criminalize child abuse, neglect, or endangerment – charges that treat an embryo or fetus as a person, complete with rights and protections that may compete with that of the person carrying them. More than 100 prosecutions recorded by Pregnancy Justice took place in Alabama, a state whose supreme court recently ruled that embryos were “extrauterine children”.

Most of the cases also involved statutes under which prosecutors do not need to prove that any harm was done to a fetus or infant. Rather, prosecutors must show that a defendant posed some “risk” to the pregnancy – which could lead to criminalization of behavior that is not actually dangerous, advocates say. “It’s ultimately, a lot of the time, based on someone’s perceptions of risky behavior, however they might define it, and it’s often based on stereotypes or outdated notions,” said Zenovia Earle, media and communications director for Pregnancy Justice. People have faced criminal consequences over their pregnancies even before Roe fell. [...]

Pregnancy Justice found that more than half of the cases involved information obtained in a medical setting. In a separate 2023 study of the criminalization of self-managed abortion between 2000 and 2020, the reproductive justice group If/When/How found that in 45% of cases, it was healthcare providers or social workers who had tipped off police to a suspected self-managed abortion.

“This is a significant phenomenon, and now we have people all over the country hiding real healthcare needs and not reaching out for help. That’s the effect of this,” Bach said. “I would like a society in which people who need care, seek care. But if this is what’s going to happen, then it is totally rational to not seek care.” For Pregnancy Justice, the link between prosecutions and the medical establishment raises questions about the post-Roe surveillance of pregnancy – in particular, how the CDC, which already tracks nationwide information about abortion, could expand its reach. Project 2025, a playbook of policies for a future conservative administration drafted by the influential thinktank the Heritage Foundation, suggests that the CDC force every state to report the number of abortions it performs, as well as abortion complications, miscarriages, stillbirths and “treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy)”. Bach and Earle declined to discuss the Project 2025 proposal, citing Pregnancy Justice’s nonprofit status.

Pregnancy Justice issues a study that more than 200 pregnancy-related prosecutions happened in the first year (June 2022-June 2023) after the Dobbs case that overturned Roe.

See Also:

SHERO: Charged With a Crime or Left to Die

[phoenixyfriend]

Big news of the morning, which I first heard on NPR's Up First (2/21/24), but here's a text version from APNews:

The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law, a decision critics said could have sweeping implications for fertility treatment in the state.

Alabama already outlaws abortion at any point in the pregnancy with no exceptions save for life of the mother, but this goes a step further, and introduces the term "extrauterine children."

Ironically, this came from a lawsuit about destroyed embryos at a fertility clinic, but rather than just ensuring the prospective parents can sue for wrongful death that the embryos were killed (someone broke in, the clinic was not at fault), this law may actually result in mass closures of fertility clinics across Alabama.

Current standards for IVF involve harvesting as many eggs at once as possible, and fertilizing them all to raise the chances of implantation with successive rounds of IVF (in case it doesn't take the first time), and then remaining embryos are frozen for if/when the couple wants their next child, and once the couple decides they're done, the embryos are destroyed to free up space for more clients. The new ruling would force them to keep embryos frozen forever, or be sued for wrongful death, which they can't afford, so many are saying they may close their doors instead.

[jensorensen]

In a case involving the accidental destruction of frozen embryos, the  the Alabama Supreme Court disturbingly referred to the embryos as "extrauterine children" kept in a "cryogenic nursery." Needless to say, this is wreaking havoc on Alabama's IVF clinics and upending the plans of many would-be parents.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

[metaltea]

Welp Alabama just passed a bill that makes it so embryos are seen as humans and IVF patients can't get treatments now. This is absolutely a stepping stone law that will lead to more things like taking away all forms of birth control from AFAB people and possibly forced pregnancies down the line… I want to get out of this fucking state as soon as possible. My parents don't get back till the 30th and I'm just here vibrating with anxiety, I just want to be back in VA. Yes it was scary living alone but it's even scarier living here and knowing if I got raped I'd probably be forced to carry some rapist's baby

How long before periods are seen as "killing potential babies" and forcibly impregnating anyone who gets a period?? It sounds outlandish but seeing the theocracy gradually take over ever since Roe v Wade was disbanded I'm not gonna say it's out of the realm of possibility. Conservatives want any excuse to fuck kids anyway Besides the children of raped women usually end up poor and uneducated, who are easier to indoctrinate into their cultish views and become minimum wage slaves, or end up in prison and become literal slaves (they're in the process of making homelessness illegal fyi, which is also absolutely bc you can force someone in prison to work for literal pennies) the judge who ruled in favor of this is also a far-right extremist, which comes to the shock of nobody

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Michael de Adder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 23, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 24, 2024

Two years ago today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to the people of Russia, begging them to avoid war. He gave the speech in Russian, his own primary language, and, reminding Russians of their shared border and history, told them to “listen to the voice of reason”: Ukrainians want peace.  

“You’ve been told I'm going to bomb Donbass,” he said. “Bomb what? The Donetsk stadium where the locals and I cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend's mom lives?” Zelensky tried to make the human cost of this conflict clear. Observers lauded the speech and contrasted its statesmanship with the ramblings in which Putin had recently engaged.

And yet Zelensky’s speech stood only as a marker. Early the next day, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. He claimed in a statement that was transparently false that he needed to defend the people in the “new republics” within Ukraine that he had recognized two days before from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands. 

Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. He planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.

But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our  soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded:

“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

That statement echoes powerfully two years later as Ukraine continues to stand against Russia’s invasion but now quite literally needs ammunition, as MAGA Republicans in Congress are refusing to take up a $95 billion national security supplemental measure that would provide aid to Ukraine. 

Instead, Republicans spent the day insisting that they do not oppose in vitro fertilization, the popular reproductive healthcare measure that the Alabama Supreme Court last Friday endangered by deciding that a fertilized human egg was a child—what they called an “extrauterine” child—and that people can be held legally responsible for destroying them. Since the decision, Alabama healthcare centers have halted their IVF programs out of fear of prosecution for their handling of embryos. 

Republicans who oppose abortion have embraced the idea that life begins at conception, an argument that leads naturally to the definition of IVF embryos as children. But this presents an enormous problem for Republicans, whose antiabortion stance is already creating warning signs for 2024. Today a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) noted that 86% of the people they polled support increased, not reduced, access to IVF procedures.

The good news for the Republicans is that their frantic defense of IVF means that the media has largely stopped talking about the news of just two days ago, the fact that the man whose testimony congressional Republicans relied on to launch an impeachment process against President Joe Biden turned out to be working with Russian operatives. House leaders have quietly deleted from their House Impeachment website the Russian disinformation that previously was central to their case against Biden. 

But today, as Republican House members remain on vacation, President Biden announced new sanctions against Russia, and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was in Ukraine, where he challenged House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to pass the national security supplemental bill. “The weight of history is on his shoulders,” Schumer told reporters in Lviv. “If he turns his back on history, he will regret it in future years.”

“Two years,” Ukraine president Zelensky wrote today. “We are all here…. Together with representatives of Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Egypt, Estonia, the EU, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, the Holy See, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Thailand, Türkiye, the UAE, the United Kingdom, the USA, Viet Nam, as well as international organisations….”

Slava Ukraini.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ralfmaximus]

In an unprecedented step and Bible-heavy opinion, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine that even one-celled fertilized eggs are legally people. Don’t call them eggs any more, that’s insulting! The proper terms are embryonic children and extrauterine children. And a fertility clinic nitrogen tank is now to be known as a “cryogenic nursery.”

Fertilized eggs are now people!

Also (and this part is not a joke) Florida is already jumping on this ruling to pass their own fertilized egg personhood law because of course DeSantis cannot let another state be shittier at human rights than Florida.

[lenbryant]

O Alabama!

(LATimes) Column: Alabama’s highest court declared frozen embryos people. The U.S. Supreme Court is to blame

Tom Parker, now Alabama’s chief justice, announcing his campaign for the position.

(Jamie Martin / Associated Press)

The Alabama Supreme Court’s breathtakingly arrogant, slapdash and pernicious opinion conferring personhood on newly formed embryos vividly illustrates the consequences of another reckless decision: the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs. Wade.

The Alabama court held last week that fertilized ova cryogenically preserved for couples having difficulty conceiving are legally and morally equivalent to newborn babies and, for that matter, 20-year-old adults. According to the court, all are human beings protected under Alabama law to precisely the same extent.

The decision clears the way for wrongful death lawsuits brought by couples whose embryos were destroyed by a patient who wandered into an in vitro fertilization clinic through an unsecured entrance, picked up several frozen fertilized eggs and, shocked by their cryogenic temperature, immediately dropped them on the floor. Reversing the trial court, the Alabama Supreme Court held that this conduct could be subject to a wrongful death claim, rendering it indistinguishable from, say, the death of a 2-year-old negligently left in a sweltering car.

Astonishingly, the sole focus of the court’s analysis was whether Alabama’s wrongful death law encompasses “extrauterine children — that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed.” The court did not even attempt to wrestle with the distinction between a just-fertilized egg — what biologists call a blastocyst, a ball of up to a few hundred cells measuring a fraction of a millimeter in diameter — and a fully formed child born at term.

It’s customary to note the parade of horribles that could be occasioned by such an extreme decision. But here the parade has already begun.

Alabama’s largest hospital announced Wednesday that it would no longer offer would-be parents in vitro fertilization procedures due to the substantial threat of criminal liability for mishandling fertilized eggs. Other providers followed suitThursday. Medical personnel who try to help couples conceive have been suddenly recast by the courts as potential murderers.

The immediate consequences don’t end there. Women who use intrauterine devices or morning-after pills, which can affect fertilized eggs, are in the eyes of Alabama law rank baby killers.

The court’s supposed legal opinion in fact rests on the tenet that life begins at conception, a matter of religious faith to which only a small minority of the country subscribes.

Chief Justice Tom Parker’s concurring opinion employs quotations and teachings from Scripture as if they had the legal force of the Bill of Rights. Passages from Genesis and Exodus, various theological tracts, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards take their place alongside the writings of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Neil M. Gorsuch. All are marshaled in support of the view that “God made every person in his image… and human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

But apart from the wrath of God, there is no attempt to rationalize the legal equation of a frozen, formless collection of cells with a living person. The court simply assumes it away with the syllogistic reasoning that Alabama’s statutory law specifies that human life includes “unborn” life.

Such ham-handedness undermines the entire opinion. The critical question for the state is not whether an embryo of any particular age can be said to be, in some sense, alive; it’s whether it is a human being deserving of the rights and protections accorded to all of us, which is a far broader and more complicated designation.

A stadium full of theologians, philosophers, ethicists and politicians couldn’t come up with an authoritative answer to that question. And in the absence of such an answer, how can the state impinge so deeply on the liberty of women and aspiring parents?

It’s in that sense that the Alabama Supreme Court’s opinion can be traced directly to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The idea of shoving this tendentious religious tract down Americans’ throats would have been a nonstarter under Roe vs. Wade, which asserted the constitutional liberty interests of women against an overreaching, moralistic state.

Post-Dobbs, those rights are featherweight. The outrage belongs with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ill reasoning and grotesque overreach.

Nor is Alabama the only state purporting to enshrine the fundamentally religious position that human life begins at conception in law. Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma issued similar proclamations in the wake of Dobbs.

The Alabama Supreme Court takes this malign presumption to its logical end, stripping every American in its jurisdiction of the right to make their own decisions on a matter of the highest moral and practical import. That’s the antithesis of liberty.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast. @harrylitman

[letterstothefutureme]

This decision is bad enough on its own but the rationale for the decision is unconstitutional.

In a concurring opinion, the chief justice of the court writes, “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

Laws cannot be based on someone’s sky daddy.

Not my club, not my rules.

[noreligionisgood]

One of those courts, it appears, is the Alabama Supreme Court, which ruled last week that frozen embryos in fertility clinics were “extrauterine children” subject to an 1872 state law allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor. “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, in which he also quoted directly from the Book of Jeremiah.

[futileexercise]

Figures! 🤦‍♂️😡

[jwood718]

Alabama Supreme Court cites the Bible as it confers personhood on embryos in fertility clinics. Adria R. Walker writes in The Guardian:

"In a first-of-its-kind decision, the Alabama supreme court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are 'children', allowing two wrongful death suits against a Mobile fertility clinic to proceed...

Alabama's Supreme Court building. wikipedia

In 2021, a patient at Mobile’s Center for Reproductive Medicine wandered into the clinic’s cryogenic nursery and removed several embryos...'the subzero temperatures at which the embryos had been stored freeze-burned the patient’s hand, causing the patient to drop the embryos on the floor, killing them'...

Alabama supreme court justice Jay Mitchell wrote that embryos are indeed protected under the state’s existing law: 'The central question presented in these consolidated appeals, which involve the death of embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, is whether the act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children...Under existing black-letter law, the answer to that question is no: the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.'...

...In 2018, Alabama voters passed a ballot measure granting fetuses full personhood rights, but the measure did not note whether that applied to frozen embryos.

In vitro fertilization. Dallas IVF.

The Alabama supreme court’s ruling repeatedly references God and the sanctity of life, citing the Bible and biblical scholars including Petrus van Mastricht, Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. Chief Justice Thomas Parker wrote: 'Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself … this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life – that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.' [emphasis added]

Cook, the lone dissenting judge, argued that the decision should have been a legislative one, not a judicial one.

“It is not my role to judge whether ending this medical procedure is good or bad -- but it doubtless will have a huge impact on many Alabamians. And it underscores the need to have the legislature – not this court – address these issues through the legislative process.”

The recent decision will probably elevate the issue of personhood ahead of the 2024 elections.

Full story from The Guardian and audio from NPR's All Things Considered, by Alejandra Marquez Janse, Justine Kenin, and Alisa Chang.

What I wonder is: what happens now to the embryos that are implanted, but fail? In the All Things Consider story, it is highlighted that multiple embryos are the norm in the procedure as just one may not result in pregnancy, so additional embryos are on-hand for a multiple attempts. If that single implementation fails, is the woman seeking to become a mother then liable for that embryo's death? It would be an easy leap for a state government to come to this conclusion, and penalize the patient. Would they cite religious texts to do so, even if the patient wasn't Christian? If that state supreme court has no hesitation in touting itself as unabashedly Christian, there won't be much stopping others doing so.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

Well, it’s official: Presidential nominee Kamala Harris has tapped Tim Walz to be her running mate. While I was still holding out hope for a Harris/Whitmer ticket, I think Walz is the best choice among the men the Vice President was said to be considering. The Minnesota governor is charming, funny and relatable—the internet says he has ‘dad energy’—and he’s clearly eager to take on Republicans. After all, it was Walz who started calling JD Vance and Donald Trump “weird,” an attack that’s working in the polls and has since been adopted by Harris’ campaign. Walz is also very strong on abortion rights, an issue that has become even more central to the presidential election now that Harris is the nominee. So it’s no surprise that while abortion rights groups are lauding Walz as the VP pick, anti-abortion activists and organizations are losing their collective shit. More on that soon, but first let’s get into Walz’s history on abortion and why the issue is so personal to him.

Walz & Abortion Rights

Walz won reelection in 2022 by campaigning on abortion rights, and under his leadership, Minnesota became the first state to codify abortion protections after Roe was overturned. Walz signed the PRO Act in January 2023, a law guaranteeing the right to abortion, birth control and other reproductive healthcare. And while abortion was already legal in Minnesota, the PRO Act added a vital extra layer of protection. Walz said, “No matter who sits on the Minnesota Supreme Court, this legislation will ensure Minnesotans have access to reproductive health care for generations to come.”

He also told CNN at the time, “This is very simple, very right to the point…We trust women in Minnesota.” In keeping with that vow to trust women, Walz also signed an executive order banning state agencies from cooperating with out-of-state investigations into abortion ‘crimes,’ and later signed a law that does the same. Minnesota’s Reproductive Freedom Defense Act shields abortion patients and providers from out-of-state legal or disciplinary actions for providing legal care; prohibits Minnesota agencies from enforcing out-of-state subpoenas, arrest warrants, and extradition requests; and protects patient records and privacy.

[...] Walz also ended a program that gave millions in funding to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers that lie to and shame women, saying, “I think women deserve better than that.” In March, he accompanied Harris on her trip to an abortion clinic—a historic first by a sitting vice president. And the Minnesota governor has made clear that much like Harris, he’s not afraid to talk about abortion rights directly and candidly. Earlier this year, he slammed Republicans for running from the issue, saying that while they try to “lay a little low and not bring it up…I'll continue to talk about it.” Finally, what’s really interesting about Walz’s support for reproductive rights is that it’s not just political for him—the issue is personal. Walz has been open about his family’s IVF story, especially after the Alabama Supreme Court decision that frozen embryos were “extrauterine children.” Both of Walz’s children with his wife Gwen—Hope and Gus—were born with the help of IVF. Walz says, “It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope.”

[...]

Anti-Abortion Response

As soon Harris’ campaign announced Walz as her running mate, anti-abortion groups didn’t waste a moment before attacking the Minnesota governor as an extremist. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America released a statement calling Harris-Walz “the most pro-abortion Democratic ticket yet,” claiming that Democrats have “become the ‘Shout Your Abortion’ party, with no limits for any reason.” If only! Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said, “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are both radically pro-abortion and see the lives of precious unborn babies as disposable inconveniences.” And Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins called them “the most radically pro-abortion ticket in American history.” (I love the idea that a woman who wants to see birth control banned thinks she has the standing to call anyone “radical.”) Hawkins’ group also tweeted that Walz “supports killing babies up until the moment of birth & even moments after the baby is born.” As I’ve noted before, this horrific ‘post-birth’ abortion lie being pushed by Trump is gaining Republican steam. It was just a few days ago, in fact, that Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Harris and Democrats support “abortion up until birth and even after birth.”

The pick of Tim Walz as Vice-President nominee for Kamala Harris is a godsend for reproductive rights and abortion access, especially in the post-Roe climate.

See Also:

Daily Kos: Anti-abortion extremists are big mad about the Harris-Walz ticket

[aibidil]

Shoutout to anyone in Alabama. You doing ok? I can’t believe I had to read the phrase “extrauterine children” in a court case

If you haven’t seen it…the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered children and you can be legally responsible for their death if you destroy them.