#far-right Republicans against ivf

[solarbird]

Let’s talk a little about the recently-noticed hatred of in vitro fertilisation coming from Trump’s MAGA base, because while it’s being treated as new, it’s not actually new. It’s only recently risen back up to visibility – ahead, even, of their hatred of contraception – thanks to Trump’s success in overturning Roe v. Wade using his Republican-packed Supreme Court.

I’ve seen a lot of people publicly wonder why the Christofash are so against IVF, given that their whole procedure is about “more babies,” and they say they actually want “more [white] babies.” I’ve also seen people suggest that it’s solely about controlling women, and, well, of course that’s kind of true, because so very very much of what they do is about control over women.

But while there is some “separating procreation and sex is bad” thought out there – particularly amongst far-right Catholics – it’s actually far more consistent than that. At least, in its origins and early discussion.

It is, in fact, the direct result of them finding out more about IVF. They found out that multiple eggs are fertilised at once, with the most apparently healthy being implanted, and the others kept frozen. They then asked themselves a couple of… I hate to say it, but reasonable questions:

If every fertilised egg is a person, why doesn’t that apply in cases of destroyed fertilised eggs left over from IVF treatments? Why aren’t we condemning the destruction of human life that happens as part of IVF?

If you hold their professed beliefs – and some of them actually do – then the answer is obvious. They naturally then came to that obvious conclusion, one that’s entirely reasonable for those who have decided against all reason that a fertilised egg is in fact an actual whole person. They decided that yes, this is the same thing, it is a person, and no, IVF should not be allowed in its current form because yes, it is murder.

All of this is, again, nonsense. But it’s a rare bit of consistent nonsense from them, and you can see how it follows from a certain point of view.

And as they came to this conclusion – some decades ago now – they knew it would be impossible in the near term to even approach it, politically. Certainly not with Roe v. Wade the law of the land, which even to those with a focused interest in IVF was a far, far bigger issue to tackle.

Besides, the people involved in this – the Beverly LaHaye crowd were involved, but not just them – actually did empathise with people trying to have children. The goal, that was fine; the method, however, was not.

So they started a campaign to try to “save” what they started calling “snowflake babies.” It was a campaign, a recruitment effort to find volunteers who would have these leftover zygotes implanted, and then carry them to term as their own. Married heterosexual women only need apply, of course – their secondary worries about IVF included thoughts that it would somehow let THE HOMOSEXUALS have children, and they were, naturally, stridently opposed.

But honestly? If someone wants to get pregnant with a leftover IVF-fertilised egg, great! Go for it. I hate the whole “married heterosexual cisgendered women only” part of course, but the rest? It’s fine! Knock yourselves out.

At the time, it almost sounded like them trying to take positive action themselves for once, rather than just driving hate against others. I even allocated a little bit of hope that maybe it marked the beginning of a healthier trend.

Alas, it did not. But at that time, it couldn’t be ruled out.

Regardless, none of this ever went away. Bush II threw them a token amount of money in his first term to promote the idea, there are some small organisations still promoting “embryo adoption,” and the term “snowflake babies” still shows up once in a while.

Really, though, they see it as a stopgap, or even harm reduction. At its core, their fight is still to define every fertilised egg as a full human being with not just full rights, but more rights than anyone carrying it.

So those aren’t backup or redundant fertilised eggs, those are “snowflake babies,” and therefore cleaning the dish containing them is murder – no matter how many actual, real new parents and actual, real new children IVF procedures help create.

Accordingly, IVF must go, for the heartache of would-be parents pales to nothing next to the God-given inalienable rights of…

…a single frozen cell in a dish, which matters ever so impossibly more than any real child ever could matter to any of them.

Now you know how they got here, and you know that this isn’t a fad, and that it will not be something they easily give up. And since this whole line of thought is absolute batshittery to anyone not buried deep in the inner nooks and crannies of their bizarre cult, hopefully you have a better idea how to use this particular bullshit against them.

Good luck out there, and good hunting.

75 days remain.

[captainjonnitkessler]

With the insanity coming out of the Alabama Supreme Court...do you have any thoughts on the concept of separation of church and state?

As a young athiest living in the US, it really feels like that line has never actually existed and history is just trying to gaslight about it.

Am I crazy? Am I just overreacting? Do you think there can be a separation between church and state in a country that is so deeply religious?

Also, hope you are feeling better!!!

(For anyone who is unaware, the Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled 8-1 that frozen embryos from IVF treatments can be considered children under state law after a fertility clinic was sued for the wrongful death of embryos that were destroyed. Chief Justice Tom Parker stated in his concurring opinion that “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.")

You're not crazy and you're not overreacting at all. If you follow any kind of atheist news, you know that there is a constant stream of lawmakers and judges overstepping the separation of church and state. Take a scroll through the Friendly Atheist blog at any time and you'll see dozens of stories about city councils, schools, state lawmakers, etc. blatantly trying to enact religious discrimination against atheists and members of minority religions.

I think separation of church and state is an unfathomably important ideal, but in practice it can be difficult to enforce. For every institute that gets sued for violating the establishment clause, another dozen are going unreported. People who DO report and/or sue about it face horrific levels of harassment. And it's getting worse with the rise of evangelicals as one of the most important and reliable voting blocs in the country - Republicans are swinging way towards Christofascism to court them. Far-right Republicans are pretty open about not believing that separation of church and state is morally or legally necessary. And effective separation of church and state relies heavily on lawmakers and judges acting in good faith, which Republicans have repeatedly proven they have no interest in doing.

Personally I think we are about to see a wave of attacks against the separation of church and state, especially with the current makeup of the Supreme Court. Almost half of Americans think America should be a "Christian nation". SCOTUS has been getting more and more biased towards religion in general and Christianity in particular even before Trump's appointees. And recently they've sided with religiously-motivated discrimination against gay people and ruled that teacher-sponsored prayer is acceptable at public school events. A Democrat in Mississippi filed a bill that would put in place a trigger law to return public prayers to schools should the case that banned school-sponsored prayer ever be overturned, and I suspect "put God back in schools" might be the next rallying cry for the right now that Roe v Wade has been overturned.

To end on a slightly higher note, it's not all doom and gloom. I think this is a pretty predictable backlash from Christians who, having their privilege questioned in even the slightest fashion, think they're now being oppressed. Most blatantly unconstitutional bills ARE being quashed, most people, religious or otherwise, don't want separation of church and state to be repealed, and secularism is on the rise. It's just that we still have a VERY long way to go towards completely removing religious privilege in this country.

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans won't stop at abortion. They want to be overseers of all reproduction. They won't be happy unless they are able to monitor every bedroom and doctor's office in the US.

We recently saw how the Republican Alabama Supreme Court ruled against IVF. That ruling was peppered with copious references to Christian fundamentalist beliefs.

Now Republicans are turning attention to birth control. The unhinged MAGA crank Charlie Kirk ranted about this recently.

Charlie Kirk, the head of the MAGA propaganda behemoth Turning Point USA, recently unveiled a novel theory as to why young women tend to vote for Democrats. Unwilling to admit that women can think for themselves, Kirk floated the theory that birth control pills cause brain damage. "Birth control like really screws up female brains," he falsely claimed before a crowd at a recent church event streamed on the far-right site Rumble. Claiming the pill "increases depression, anxiety [and] suicidal ideation," he then blamed women's voting patterns on hormonal contraception. "It creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women," Kirk argued.

I would argue that Trump and his followers are the ones with screwed up brains. There is a strong tendency of misogynistic patriarchy in the GOP. They feel a need to control women – possibly because of their own feelings of sexual inadequacy.

But of course, Kirk is not sincerely mistaken and he certainly isn't concerned about the wellbeing of women, which all reputable research shows is dramatically improved by having control over their fertility. Kirk's doctor cosplay is part of a much larger and semi-coordinated strategy among right-wing leaders to demonize birth control and train the GOP base into believing that restricting, or even banning, contraception is justified.  As the Washington Post reported last month, right-wing activists have been flooding social media with the same lies that Kirk was echoing in this video. It's a well-financed disinformation campaign, getting a major boost from MAGA billionaire Peter Thiel, who has aggressively financed teams of messengers to falsely claim that hormonal birth control "tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain." Doctors report that the tidal wave of misinformation about birth control is creating a health care crisis, including women who "come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control." 

Female empowerment is anathema to many on the far right. And the right to control one's body is part of that empowerment.

At heart, Republicans are anti-freedom.

Of course, the real reason MAGA leaders don't like birth control is they oppose the freedom and opportunities that it has afforded women. Kirk barely bothers to hide that this is his real agenda. In the very same talk, he also tries to threaten women who hold out for Mr. Right instead of settling for Mr. Incel: "In their early 30's they get really upset because they say the boys don't want to date me anymore because they're not at their prime," he claims, echoing the unevidenced revenge fantasy that dominates misogynist message boards. 

Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for over 49 years until the Trump-Bush Supreme Court rescinded it in 2022.

Birth control medications have been around since 1960. Despite that 64 year precedent, don't think that Republicans won't try to find some way to ban them if given a chance.

[douxlen]

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

New Post has been published on https://douxle.com/2024/08/10/ivf-changed-america-but-its-future-is-under-threat/

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

In February, a horrified Elizabeth Carr scrolled through headline after headline about a pause on in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in Alabama. The Alabama Supreme Court had ruled that frozen embryos have the legal rights of children, a decision that meant fertility providers could feasibly face prosecution if they destroyed one. Rather than take that risk, some fertility clinics halted IVF services entirely.

Carr, who in 1981 became the first baby in the U.S. born using IVF, felt like “an endangered species.” When Carr was born, IVF—a process of fertilizing eggs outside a woman’s body, then implanting a resulting embryo in her uterus—was new and largely unknown. Carr’s parents, who desperately wanted children but struggled to have them naturally, were willing to face public scrutiny and repeatedly travel from their home in Massachusetts to a pioneering clinic in Virginia to try the cutting-edge procedure. IVF’s success for the Carrs led not only to their daughter’s historic birth, but also compelled Elizabeth to become an advocate for reproductive rights when she grew up. Over those recent days in February, when patients in Alabama were shut out of fertility clinics, Carr acutely felt the importance of her work. Moments like those, she says, are “why we advocate so loudly.”

After public outcry and bipartisan pushback, Alabama lawmakers quickly passed protections for IVF providers, and services resumed. But IVF is still under attack.

Despite the backlash, judges in Alabama declined to reconsider their controversial ruling. And more than a dozen other U.S. states have laws in place that could be interpreted as bestowing personhood rights on an embryo, even if it has not yet resulted in a pregnancy. Courts in other states haven’t yet applied these laws in ways that directly threaten IVF—although Louisiana law forces fertility providers to ship embryos out of state for destruction—but the possibility is there if the wrong case comes before the wrong judge, says Rebecca Reingold, an associate director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Right now, it is politically unpopular to attack IVF, a technology that has given life to millions of people and hope to some of the one in six adults worldwide with infertility. Only 8% of U.S. adults actively oppose access to IVF, according to recent polling, and even lawmakers from states that have cracked down on abortion, like Texas, have introduced bills to protect IVF.

And yet, in June, Republican senators—including former President Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance—voted against a bill that would have established a federal right to IVF care. The same month, members of the Southern Baptist church voted to oppose the use of IVF, a decision that has no legal ramifications but signals a growing willingness among religious conservatives to embrace prenatal personhood concepts that effectively place IVF in the same category as abortion.

How did we get here? And where are we going? 

Growing anti-IVF sentiment

The concept of prenatal personhood isn’t new, but it has historically been unpopular. In a 2013 legal journal article, reproductive-rights expert Maya Manian argued that’s because “public concern over the ‘side effects’ of personhood laws”—such as infringing on fertility care, contraception access, and women’s health care more broadly—“seems to have persuaded even those opposed to abortion to reject personhood legislation.” It was, in other words, a step too far for most people.

In a relatively short span of time, however, the idea has gone from “radical or fringe” to one that is gaining ground, Reingold says. It has even transcended the anti-abortion movement, with ex-spouses in some cases using the concept to argue that frozen embryos should be treated by the courts as children, not marital property, during divorce proceedings. As such ideas snowball, IVF may become the next frontier in the battle over reproductive rights, advocates and scholars say.

Read More: The Silent Shame of Male Infertility

“It’s clear to us—it always has been—that the anti-abortion movement has not, and will not, stop their efforts at limiting or banning abortion,” says Karla Torres, who leads the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights’ work on assisted reproductive technology. They are “squarely targeting reproductive freedom more broadly,” drawing everything from IVF to contraception into the fray.

If IVF becomes harder to access, it’s hard to overstate the effect for American families and culture at large. About 2% of babies born in the U.S. in recent years—nearly 100,000 annually—arrived with the help of IVF. But the technology’s impact transcends statistics. In about a half century of use, it has reshaped what it means to be a parent, who gets to be one, and how—progress that’s now under threat.

A confusing position

In some ways, IVF is an unlikely target. The technology enables people to have badly wanted biological children, a sentiment that could be seen as having a “conservative traditional family aspect to it,” says Amanda Roth, an associate professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at the State University of New York at Geneseo. The importance of having children is a regular conservative talking point—see: Vance recently calling child-free women “cat ladies” without a “direct stake” in the future of America—and IVF makes it possible for more people to do that.

But many in the anti-abortion movement argue that life begins at the moment of conception—that is, the moment sperm fertilizes an egg to create an embryo, either the old-fashioned way or in a laboratory. (A fertilized egg is considered an embryo until the end of the 10th week of pregnancy, when it becomes a fetus.)

To that effect, about a third of U.S. states currently have laws that establish prenatal personhood rights at some stage of pregnancy, usually as a means of curtailing access to abortion by establishing that terminating a pregnancy is tantamount to killing a child. Nine of these laws, such as those in Arkansas, Kansas, and Tennessee, are either sweeping enough or vaguely worded enough that they could put IVF services at risk, according to analysis from the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice provided to TIME. Six additional states, including the Dakotas, Michigan, and Oklahoma, have either feticide or wrongful death laws broad enough to potentially apply to embryos. And there’s always the possibility of new laws: already in 2024, more than a dozen bills focused on prenatal personhood have been introduced across the U.S.

Read More: The Abortion Fight Isn’t a ‘War on Women.’ It’s a War on Poor Women

Greer Donley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies abortion law, doesn’t think curtailing access to IVF is a “priority” for the anti-abortion movement, but rather an “unfortunate side effect that [anti-abortion advocates] haven’t been able to account for.” It’s a narrative problem: to argue an embryo in a mother’s womb is a person, but one sitting in a fertility clinic freezer isn’t, would weaken the movement’s argument. So, despite the cognitive dissonance, IVF has become “collateral damage” in the abortion wars, Donley believes.

Whether the situation was intentional or not, threats to IVF are real. The Alabama Supreme Court demonstrated as much in February, when it ruled that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to not-yet-implanted embryos, prompting fertility clinics to pause IVF services for fear that patients or providers could be legally liable if embryos were destroyed in the course of care. That’s not an irrational fear: embryos are destroyed all the time in the fertility world, either purposely (perhaps because a patient no longer wishes to pay for storage, or because the embryo is unlikely to result in a healthy pregnancy) or because of human error.

Accidents happen, says Dr. Gerard Letterie, a reproductive endocrinologist at Seattle Reproductive Medicine who has written about the potential impact of fetal personhood laws on clinicians. An embryo could be destroyed through an innocent mistake, like someone tripping while carrying a petri dish. “If that were to be made a felony charge, that’s a big deal,” Letterie says.

In that scenario, clinics might stop services entirely to avoid putting providers in legal jeopardy, as happened in Alabama. Or, even if services proceeded, providers might stop practicing in states with punitive laws, Letterie says, making access to fertility care as scattershot as access to abortion care. Already, fertility clinics tend to be clustered in wealthier urban areas.

Read More: Why It’s So Hard to Have Your Fertility Tested

Even short of criminal charges for providers, prenatal personhood laws could affect fertility practices, Letterie says. He can imagine policies that limit the number of eggs that may be fertilized per cycle to avoid creating extra embryos that ultimately end up discarded. Such policies—the likes of which have already been implemented elsewhere in the world, such as in Malta—could reduce the odds of patients getting pregnant, since not all embryos are viable, and force people to go through more rounds of treatment, making IVF more expensive and inaccessible than it already is. IVF can already cost upward of $10,000 per cycle without insurance, and coverage varies by state and insurance provider. If costs go up even more, Letterie says, IVF would be inaccessible to virtually everyone who isn’t mega-wealthy or lucky to have excellent health insurance.

Even taking finances out of the picture, threats to IVF have particularly high stakes for certain people. Those who stand to lose the most are those for whom IVF has been revolutionary over its half century of use: namely same-sex couples, people with medical infertility, and those who have decided to have children without a partner or later in life. “The existence of reproductive technologies has opened up new horizons for family life,” says Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University and author of Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. In a future without reliable access to IVF, the possibilities of what families can look like might shrink.

A crossroads for U.S. culture

IVF and other fertility services helped break open the narrow definition of family that dominated for so long—a married man and woman and their naturally conceived children—to reveal a whole world of options. A mother can be 45 and single, even if she’s survived cancer or had her fallopian tubes removed or needs to use a donor egg to get pregnant. Same-sex couples can use “reciprocal” IVF to incorporate both of their genetic material. A child can even have three biological parents, a controversial technique that is not currently legal in the U.S. but is in several other countries.

“We’ve seen a significant diversification in how people understand kinship, relatedness, and parenting,” says Sarah Franklin, who directs the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. 

This progress has not been equally felt around the world. Compared to the U.S., Europe and Asia have historically employed stricter regulations on the use of reproductive technologies like IVF. Although some of those policies have loosened in recent years, single and older women, trans and non-binary people, and/or same-sex couples are still barred from using reproductive technologies in countries including China, Poland, Turkey, and Italy. And in many poorer countries, including most of the ones in Africa, there is next to no access to IVF at all.

Even in the U.S., where IVF is much more broadly used, reproductive medicine has not wiped out persistent stereotypes and social norms, says Arthur Greil, a professor emeritus at Alfred University in New York and author of Not Yet Pregnant: Infertile Couples in Contemporary America. People are willing to pay IVF’s exorbitant fees, at least in part, because society still emphasizes the importance of a genetic relationship between parent and child, Greil says. And, he says, the knee-jerk assumption is still that a child has both a mother and father. “If you are a single woman with a child, people just assume that you must have been divorced,” Greil says. “It’s become impolite to ask questions like, ‘Where is the baby’s father?’ But people still have the questions.”

Read More: I Was Told I Was Too Fat to Freeze My Eggs

Still, IVF has made what was once impossible—or, at the very least, difficult or done outside the scope of mainstream medicine—possible for many people. Sex, age, and medical diagnoses don’t necessarily close the road to biological parenthood anymore; they are just speed bumps. Reproductive technologies are expensive and imperfect, working only about half the time in the best circumstances and becoming even less of a sure bet among patients who are older or relying on donated embryos. But it has made the possibility of biological parenthood real for swaths of the population that, a century ago, would have had zero or few options. “Fertility medicine has made all of us parents-in-waiting,” says Laura Mamo, a professor of public health at San Francisco State University who studies the intersection of sexuality and medicine.

The trickle-down effects can be seen throughout U.S. culture. Women, no longer so pressured by biological clocks to end their careers just as they’re advancing, now outnumber men in the college-educated workforce, and some employers offer fertility benefits to entice workers to stay longer. People are getting married later, if ever, freed from the need to settle for an imperfect partner to have a family. Queer parenthood is on the rise, and same-sex couples are making fertility equality a new social-justice issue, fighting for fair treatment by insurance providers and clinicians. Scientific advances in fertility medicine, like the ability to pick embryos by sex, are even raising important new bioethical dilemmas.

IVF is not solely responsible for those shifts—Franklin sees it more as a “mirror” reflecting major societal changes and conditions—but it plays a part. Making the technology harder or impossible to access, then, would have profound effects on countless people, particularly those from marginalized groups. And that, Mamo says, may be exactly the point for some people pushing forward the prenatal personhood movement.

“It’s not really about personhood,” Mamo says. “It’s really about this expansion of gender and family and sexuality and autonomy over people’s bodies.”

Fighting back

Already, legislators and reproductive-rights advocates are preparing for battle. In his first speech as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reaffirmed his commitment to protecting reproductive health care including IVF, a technology that he and his wife used to have their daughter, Hope. “When Vice President [Harris] and I talk about freedom, we talk about the freedom to make your own health care decisions,” Walz said.

Elsewhere, the Center for Reproductive Rights has for years been working with partner advocacy groups and legislators to expand access to IVF by implementing new state policies around fertility coverage and broadening those that already exist, which are often written in ways that exclude same-sex couples or people who aren’t cisgender. That work is continuing in earnest, Torres says. And in the aftermath of the Alabama decision, lawmakers in at least a dozen states introduced bills meant to either protect IVF providers from liability or specify that embryos outside the human body do not legally qualify as people, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights nonprofit. A broader package of pro-IVF bills moved forward at the federal level before being blocked by Republican senators in June.

Along with legislative solutions, the reproductive-rights movement is also trying to develop legal defenses that can be used to stop prenatal personhood arguments in court, says Donley, the Pittsburgh law professor. Judges may hold long-term appointments and don’t necessarily need to win elections—which means some can stray from public opinion with fewer consequences than elected officials. “I feel confident right now that the politics of reproductive rights are such that Republican legislatures aren’t going to pass anti-IVF bills,” Donley says. “Republican judges are another story. They get to do whatever they want.”

Read More: ‘I Don’t Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.’ Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

That means people who want to protect IVF access will need compelling legal arguments, says Georgetown’s Reingold. One, she says, could be pointing out the slippery slope of prenatal personhood. If an embryo is considered a person in one legal context, it could be considered one in many: a pregnant person could arguably claim their embryo as a tax dependent, a beneficiary for public assistance, or (in a lower-stakes scenario) another person for the purposes of driving in a carpool lane. Pointing out “consequences for other areas of the law that haven’t necessarily been completely thought through” could be an effective strategy for limiting the influence of fetal personhood arguments, Reingold says.

Another possible consequence: if an embryo is legally considered a person, a pregnant person could feasibly be criminalized for a miscarriage or pregnancy complication, says Kulsoom Ijaz, a senior staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice. Ijaz says she’s “cautiously optimistic” that pointing out such dystopian ripple effects would sway some judges and lawmakers. “It’s a matter of summoning defiant hope so that we…make sure there is no more rollback on people’s most basic civil and human rights,” she says.

There is some precedent to back Ijaz’ optimism. Even in the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the justices did not take a position on “if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” which could foreshadow a broader hesitation for judges throughout the U.S. court system to consider questions of legal personhood.

That reluctance may not last forever. But in the meantime, IVF advocates like Carr, the first U.S. person born using the technology, are leaning on some of the “best tools” they have: their own stories, which underscore how life-changing IVF can be for individuals, couples, and families. “I always knew there were people who didn’t agree with how I was born. Around age 10, I realized I can potentially educate people,” Carr says. “I feel very strongly, and I always have, that people fear things they don’t understand.”

The stakes of that education campaign are high. Carr’s birth was a historic first for the U.S. “I do not want to think about who could potentially be the last,” she says.

[sa7abnews]

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/09/ivf-changed-america-but-its-future-is-under-threat/

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

In February, a horrified Elizabeth Carr scrolled through headline after headline about a pause on in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in Alabama. The Alabama Supreme Court had ruled that frozen embryos have the legal rights of children, a decision that meant fertility providers could feasibly face prosecution if they destroyed one. Rather than take that risk, some fertility clinics halted IVF services entirely.

Carr, who in 1981 became the first baby in the U.S. born using IVF, felt like “an endangered species.” When Carr was born, IVF—a process of fertilizing eggs outside a woman’s body, then implanting a resulting embryo in her uterus—was new and largely unknown. Carr’s parents, who desperately wanted children but struggled to have them naturally, were willing to face public scrutiny and repeatedly travel from their home in Massachusetts to a pioneering clinic in Virginia to try the cutting-edge procedure. IVF’s success for the Carrs led not only to their daughter’s historic birth, but also compelled Elizabeth to become an advocate for reproductive rights when she grew up. Over those recent days in February, when patients in Alabama were shut out of fertility clinics, Carr acutely felt the importance of her work. Moments like those, she says, are “why we advocate so loudly.”

After public outcry and bipartisan pushback, Alabama lawmakers quickly passed protections for IVF providers, and services resumed. But IVF is still under attack.

Despite the backlash, judges in Alabama declined to reconsider their controversial ruling. And more than a dozen other U.S. states have laws in place that could be interpreted as bestowing personhood rights on an embryo, even if it has not yet resulted in a pregnancy. Courts in other states haven’t yet applied these laws in ways that directly threaten IVF—although Louisiana law forces fertility providers to ship embryos out of state for destruction—but the possibility is there if the wrong case comes before the wrong judge, says Rebecca Reingold, an associate director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Right now, it is politically unpopular to attack IVF, a technology that has given life to millions of people and hope to some of the one in six adults worldwide with infertility. Only 8% of U.S. adults actively oppose access to IVF, according to recent polling, and even lawmakers from states that have cracked down on abortion, like Texas, have introduced bills to protect IVF.

And yet, in June, Republican senators—including former President Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance—voted against a bill that would have established a federal right to IVF care. The same month, members of the Southern Baptist church voted to oppose the use of IVF, a decision that has no legal ramifications but signals a growing willingness among religious conservatives to embrace prenatal personhood concepts that effectively place IVF in the same category as abortion.

How did we get here? And where are we going? 

Growing anti-IVF sentiment

The concept of prenatal personhood isn’t new, but it has historically been unpopular. In a 2013 legal journal article, reproductive-rights expert Maya Manian argued that’s because “public concern over the ‘side effects’ of personhood laws”—such as infringing on fertility care, contraception access, and women’s health care more broadly—“seems to have persuaded even those opposed to abortion to reject personhood legislation.” It was, in other words, a step too far for most people.

In a relatively short span of time, however, the idea has gone from “radical or fringe” to one that is gaining ground, Reingold says. It has even transcended the anti-abortion movement, with ex-spouses in some cases using the concept to argue that frozen embryos should be treated by the courts as children, not marital property, during divorce proceedings. As such ideas snowball, IVF may become the next frontier in the battle over reproductive rights, advocates and scholars say.

Read More: The Silent Shame of Male Infertility

“It’s clear to us—it always has been—that the anti-abortion movement has not, and will not, stop their efforts at limiting or banning abortion,” says Karla Torres, who leads the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights’ work on assisted reproductive technology. They are “squarely targeting reproductive freedom more broadly,” drawing everything from IVF to contraception into the fray.

If IVF becomes harder to access, it’s hard to overstate the effect for American families and culture at large. About 2% of babies born in the U.S. in recent years—nearly 100,000 annually—arrived with the help of IVF. But the technology’s impact transcends statistics. In about a half century of use, it has reshaped what it means to be a parent, who gets to be one, and how—progress that’s now under threat.

A confusing position

In some ways, IVF is an unlikely target. The technology enables people to have badly wanted biological children, a sentiment that could be seen as having a “conservative traditional family aspect to it,” says Amanda Roth, an associate professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at the State University of New York at Geneseo. The importance of having children is a regular conservative talking point—see: Vance recently calling child-free women “cat ladies” without a “direct stake” in the future of America—and IVF makes it possible for more people to do that.

But many in the anti-abortion movement argue that life begins at the moment of conception—that is, the moment sperm fertilizes an egg to create an embryo, either the old-fashioned way or in a laboratory. (A fertilized egg is considered an embryo until the end of the 10th week of pregnancy, when it becomes a fetus.)

To that effect, about a third of U.S. states currently have laws that establish prenatal personhood rights at some stage of pregnancy, usually as a means of curtailing access to abortion by establishing that terminating a pregnancy is tantamount to killing a child. Nine of these laws, such as those in Arkansas, Kansas, and Tennessee, are either sweeping enough or vaguely worded enough that they could put IVF services at risk, according to analysis from the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice provided to TIME. Six additional states, including the Dakotas, Michigan, and Oklahoma, have either feticide or wrongful death laws broad enough to potentially apply to embryos. And there’s always the possibility of new laws: already in 2024, more than a dozen bills focused on prenatal personhood have been introduced across the U.S.

Read More: The Abortion Fight Isn’t a ‘War on Women.’ It’s a War on Poor Women

Greer Donley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies abortion law, doesn’t think curtailing access to IVF is a “priority” for the anti-abortion movement, but rather an “unfortunate side effect that [anti-abortion advocates] haven’t been able to account for.” It’s a narrative problem: to argue an embryo in a mother’s womb is a person, but one sitting in a fertility clinic freezer isn’t, would weaken the movement’s argument. So, despite the cognitive dissonance, IVF has become “collateral damage” in the abortion wars, Donley believes.

Whether the situation was intentional or not, threats to IVF are real. The Alabama Supreme Court demonstrated as much in February, when it ruled that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to not-yet-implanted embryos, prompting fertility clinics to pause IVF services for fear that patients or providers could be legally liable if embryos were destroyed in the course of care. That’s not an irrational fear: embryos are destroyed all the time in the fertility world, either purposely (perhaps because a patient no longer wishes to pay for storage, or because the embryo is unlikely to result in a healthy pregnancy) or because of human error.

Accidents happen, says Dr. Gerard Letterie, a reproductive endocrinologist at Seattle Reproductive Medicine who has written about the potential impact of fetal personhood laws on clinicians. An embryo could be destroyed through an innocent mistake, like someone tripping while carrying a petri dish. “If that were to be made a felony charge, that’s a big deal,” Letterie says.

In that scenario, clinics might stop services entirely to avoid putting providers in legal jeopardy, as happened in Alabama. Or, even if services proceeded, providers might stop practicing in states with punitive laws, Letterie says, making access to fertility care as scattershot as access to abortion care. Already, fertility clinics tend to be clustered in wealthier urban areas.

Read More: Why It’s So Hard to Have Your Fertility Tested

Even short of criminal charges for providers, prenatal personhood laws could affect fertility practices, Letterie says. He can imagine policies that limit the number of eggs that may be fertilized per cycle to avoid creating extra embryos that ultimately end up discarded. Such policies—the likes of which have already been implemented elsewhere in the world, such as in Malta—could reduce the odds of patients getting pregnant, since not all embryos are viable, and force people to go through more rounds of treatment, making IVF more expensive and inaccessible than it already is. IVF can already cost upward of $10,000 per cycle without insurance, and coverage varies by state and insurance provider. If costs go up even more, Letterie says, IVF would be inaccessible to virtually everyone who isn’t mega-wealthy or lucky to have excellent health insurance.

Even taking finances out of the picture, threats to IVF have particularly high stakes for certain people. Those who stand to lose the most are those for whom IVF has been revolutionary over its half century of use: namely same-sex couples, people with medical infertility, and those who have decided to have children without a partner or later in life. “The existence of reproductive technologies has opened up new horizons for family life,” says Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University and author of Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. In a future without reliable access to IVF, the possibilities of what families can look like might shrink.

A crossroads for U.S. culture

IVF and other fertility services helped break open the narrow definition of family that dominated for so long—a married man and woman and their naturally conceived children—to reveal a whole world of options. A mother can be 45 and single, even if she’s survived cancer or had her fallopian tubes removed or needs to use a donor egg to get pregnant. Same-sex couples can use “reciprocal” IVF to incorporate both of their genetic material. A child can even have three biological parents, a controversial technique that is not currently legal in the U.S. but is in several other countries.

“We’ve seen a significant diversification in how people understand kinship, relatedness, and parenting,” says Sarah Franklin, who directs the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. 

This progress has not been equally felt around the world. Compared to the U.S., Europe and Asia have historically employed stricter regulations on the use of reproductive technologies like IVF. Although some of those policies have loosened in recent years, single and older women, trans and non-binary people, and/or same-sex couples are still barred from using reproductive technologies in countries including China, Poland, Turkey, and Italy. And in many poorer countries, including most of the ones in Africa, there is next to no access to IVF at all.

Even in the U.S., where IVF is much more broadly used, reproductive medicine has not wiped out persistent stereotypes and social norms, says Arthur Greil, a professor emeritus at Alfred University in New York and author of Not Yet Pregnant: Infertile Couples in Contemporary America. People are willing to pay IVF’s exorbitant fees, at least in part, because society still emphasizes the importance of a genetic relationship between parent and child, Greil says. And, he says, the knee-jerk assumption is still that a child has both a mother and father. “If you are a single woman with a child, people just assume that you must have been divorced,” Greil says. “It’s become impolite to ask questions like, ‘Where is the baby’s father?’ But people still have the questions.”

Read More: I Was Told I Was Too Fat to Freeze My Eggs

Still, IVF has made what was once impossible—or, at the very least, difficult or done outside the scope of mainstream medicine—possible for many people. Sex, age, and medical diagnoses don’t necessarily close the road to biological parenthood anymore; they are just speed bumps. Reproductive technologies are expensive and imperfect, working only about half the time in the best circumstances and becoming even less of a sure bet among patients who are older or relying on donated embryos. But it has made the possibility of biological parenthood real for swaths of the population that, a century ago, would have had zero or few options. “Fertility medicine has made all of us parents-in-waiting,” says Laura Mamo, a professor of public health at San Francisco State University who studies the intersection of sexuality and medicine.

The trickle-down effects can be seen throughout U.S. culture. Women, no longer so pressured by biological clocks to end their careers just as they’re advancing, now outnumber men in the college-educated workforce, and some employers offer fertility benefits to entice workers to stay longer. People are getting married later, if ever, freed from the need to settle for an imperfect partner to have a family. Queer parenthood is on the rise, and same-sex couples are making fertility equality a new social-justice issue, fighting for fair treatment by insurance providers and clinicians. Scientific advances in fertility medicine, like the ability to pick embryos by sex, are even raising important new bioethical dilemmas.

IVF is not solely responsible for those shifts—Franklin sees it more as a “mirror” reflecting major societal changes and conditions—but it plays a part. Making the technology harder or impossible to access, then, would have profound effects on countless people, particularly those from marginalized groups. And that, Mamo says, may be exactly the point for some people pushing forward the prenatal personhood movement.

“It’s not really about personhood,” Mamo says. “It’s really about this expansion of gender and family and sexuality and autonomy over people’s bodies.”

Fighting back

Already, legislators and reproductive-rights advocates are preparing for battle. In his first speech as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reaffirmed his commitment to protecting reproductive health care including IVF, a technology that he and his wife used to have their daughter, Hope. “When Vice President [Harris] and I talk about freedom, we talk about the freedom to make your own health care decisions,” Walz said.

Elsewhere, the Center for Reproductive Rights has for years been working with partner advocacy groups and legislators to expand access to IVF by implementing new state policies around fertility coverage and broadening those that already exist, which are often written in ways that exclude same-sex couples or people who aren’t cisgender. That work is continuing in earnest, Torres says. And in the aftermath of the Alabama decision, lawmakers in at least a dozen states introduced bills meant to either protect IVF providers from liability or specify that embryos outside the human body do not legally qualify as people, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights nonprofit. A broader package of pro-IVF bills moved forward at the federal level before being blocked by Republican senators in June.

Along with legislative solutions, the reproductive-rights movement is also trying to develop legal defenses that can be used to stop prenatal personhood arguments in court, says Donley, the Pittsburgh law professor. Judges may hold long-term appointments and don’t necessarily need to win elections—which means some can stray from public opinion with fewer consequences than elected officials. “I feel confident right now that the politics of reproductive rights are such that Republican legislatures aren’t going to pass anti-IVF bills,” Donley says. “Republican judges are another story. They get to do whatever they want.”

Read More: ‘I Don’t Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.’ Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

That means people who want to protect IVF access will need compelling legal arguments, says Georgetown’s Reingold. One, she says, could be pointing out the slippery slope of prenatal personhood. If an embryo is considered a person in one legal context, it could be considered one in many: a pregnant person could arguably claim their embryo as a tax dependent, a beneficiary for public assistance, or (in a lower-stakes scenario) another person for the purposes of driving in a carpool lane. Pointing out “consequences for other areas of the law that haven’t necessarily been completely thought through” could be an effective strategy for limiting the influence of fetal personhood arguments, Reingold says.

Another possible consequence: if an embryo is legally considered a person, a pregnant person could feasibly be criminalized for a miscarriage or pregnancy complication, says Kulsoom Ijaz, a senior staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice. Ijaz says she’s “cautiously optimistic” that pointing out such dystopian ripple effects would sway some judges and lawmakers. “It’s a matter of summoning defiant hope so that we…make sure there is no more rollback on people’s most basic civil and human rights,” she says.

There is some precedent to back Ijaz’ optimism. Even in the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the justices did not take a position on “if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” which could foreshadow a broader hesitation for judges throughout the U.S. court system to consider questions of legal personhood.

That reluctance may not last forever. But in the meantime, IVF advocates like Carr, the first U.S. person born using the technology, are leaning on some of the “best tools” they have: their own stories, which underscore how life-changing IVF can be for individuals, couples, and families. “I always knew there were people who didn’t agree with how I was born. Around age 10, I realized I can potentially educate people,” Carr says. “I feel very strongly, and I always have, that people fear things they don’t understand.”

The stakes of that education campaign are high. Carr’s birth was a historic first for the U.S. “I do not want to think about who could potentially be the last,” she says.

[be-ca-lm]

I wanna see the far right just go to balls to the wall on this shit. Personhood for all unborn fetuses. Assign social security numbers at conception. Malicious compliance. Let's file our taxes with unborn dependents. Death certificates and autopsies for all miscarriages. Clog the system. Crash the economy. I wanna see men who kill pregnant women in drunk driving accidents charged with double homicide. Two counts of vehicular manslaughter. Call your representative every time your period starts. Ban IVF. Require men to have their wives' or girlfriends' permission before having reproductive healthcare procedures. File domestic violence charges against fetuses that endanger the life of the mother. Sue the unborn for emotional distress in cases of rape and incest. Sue the state for emotional distress! Overwhelm every tip line and online form provided for people to report on women and abortion providers with fake tips and misinformation. Retroactively charge republican women who have had abortions with criminal charges.

Obviously, some of these are detrimental and not desirable at all. It's time to be dangerous.

[disembodiedapparition]

Breaking The Pro-Life Argument Down:

I think it’s hilarious how right wing “facts don’t care about your feelings” activists are almost always pro-life. The argument against abortion as an accessible form of birth control is 100% an emotional appeal, and here’s why:

1. “You have no right to kill your fetus. It’s not your body, the baby is an individual and has the right to life.”:

Of course, all embryos are human individuals, separate from their mothers. They have their own unique DNA composition, and are definitely alive. But do they deserve the right to life, which would make abortion equivalent to murder?

Pro-lifers are largely okay with IVF, an industry that throws away and destroys millions of fertilized embryos every day. In-vitro fertilization is an uncertain science, so couples are advised to fertilize multiple eggs in the labs in case the first few don’t work out. If a couple succeeds and have extra embryos left, they have the option to continue paying to store them in the lab, donate them to medical research, or destroy them.

Anti-abortion bills always have exceptions for IVF clinics. Republican, pro-life lawmakers have literally had children via IVF. If a pro-lifer ever tells you that life begins at conception and that every embryo has the right to life, know that it’s bullshit. They don’t care about an industry that kills more embryos in a day than Planned Parenthood does in a year.

2. There are two possible responses to this.

A) “Fine, let’s ban IVF.” Out of all the conservative groups in America, only one major group explicitly stands against IVF – the Catholic Church. The same organization that condemns sex before marriage, homosexuality, divorce, masturbation/porn, the use of condoms, getting drunk or high, and tattoos. At this point, I’m assuming you understand that the Church’s ideas of morality are regressive, illogical, primitive, and… make life extremely boring. IVF is a wonderful science that brings children to parents who want them all over the world and is in no way a bad thing.

B) “Fine. Maybe not at conception, but at [x] months, it’s a baby.” This is the point where most conservatives start arguing about the point up till you should be allowed to have an abortion. Two weeks? Six weeks? Three months? Unfortunately, there is no scientific way to determine when an embryo is no longer just a clump of cells and now a human being with rights.

Since pro-lifers are okay with IVF, we can assume they don’t believe in the right to life at conception. How about the heartbeat theory? At six weeks, the fetus develops a heartbeat, and proponents argue that it is the point at which the fetus is no longer simply a fetus, but a human being. However, having a heartbeat doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right to life.

Legally, if you are brain dead, you’re… dead. You no longer have the right to life, which is why organ donation is possible. All this while having a heartbeat, so that’s clearly not a viable hallmark of an individual that inherently has the right to life. So while it’s true that at six weeks a baby develops (what is flimsily termed as) a heartbeat, that doesn’t somehow give it rights to life that it did not have before. So far, I haven’t come across any other sensible theories as to “when” an embryo deserves the right to life. It’s a lousy concept to begin with, as blurry as the legal definition of adulthood – not all 18+ year olds are mature and nothing fundamentally changes in a person once the clock strikes midnight. Similarly, embryo development is a process. There’s really no point at which you can logically claim it’s transformed into a human being with rights.

3. Evidently, there are two extremes — life begins at conception, vs life doesn’t begin until birth.

There’s no “scientific backing” for a point in between, but you’ll never find a pro-choice advocate arguing in favor of the latter, because it’s called an extreme for a reason. The best way to deal with the abortion issue at this point is to leave the science and technicalities alone, and think about the people who are actually getting abortions.

4. “Use protection and you won’t get pregnant”:

Protection is never 100% reliable. Plus: if two people are irresponsible enough to have unprotected sex, what makes you think they’re responsible enough to have and raise children? The number of children growing up with unqualified, immature, abusive, or neglectful parents automatically disproves the theory that parenthood beings about a sense of personal responsibility. Being raised by bad parents inflicts often irreparable damage on children. Treating babies as some sort of “divine punishment” for irresponsible sex, instead of human beings who deserve a stable upbringing, is harmful on both an individual and collective scale. The data on irresponsible, neglectful, or abusive childhoods/single parent childhoods speaks for itself. In the quest to punish irresponsible parents, most of the damage is inflicted on their children, which in turn impacts the generation that will lead us forward into the future. It is in our best interests to raise as many mature, healthy, and productive young adults as possible, and while not every child born into these circumstances live lives of mental health/psychological/intimacy issues and criminal behavior, a large majority do. Growing up with bad parents is simply not ideal for an impressionable child’s wellbeing. Quality of life > quantity of life.

5. “Don’t have sex if you don’t want to have children.”:

Unhelpful, unrealistic, and telling of no real desire to solve the problem at hand. People will have sex. What are we going to do to make sure the sex doesn’t lead to unplanned pregnancies?

6. “Okay but what about xyz who had an abortion and has regretted it ever since?”:

Abortion is a result of unplanned and unfortunate circumstances. Whether it’s because the doctor tells you your baby will be stillborn or born with a fatal illness, or if you were raped, or if you had sex with your boyfriend during your first year of college and found yourself pregnant: these are bad situations, and no matter what you do, there’s always a chance you’ll look back and wish you’d done things differently. Kept the baby? Well, maybe you’ll find that the baby brought newfound purpose to your life. But maybe the baby added an additional financial strain to your life and forced you to quit your job, leaving you destitute and homeless with no way to feed it. Alternatively, if you got an abortion, maybe you end up being able to finish college and fulfil all your goals… or maybe you regret that decision for the rest of your life. There’s no way to guarantee that you’re making the right decision, but being informed about your options, and having options available, makes it more likely that you do. That’s why we are advocating for informed choice. Whether they eventually choose to keep the baby or have an abortion, give women the time and resources to truly evaluate their options and do what’s best for them in their own circumstances.

7. “Why kill the baby? Put it up for adoption.”:

The adoption system is known for being isolating, exploitative, and unhealthy for children growing up in it. Being adopted into a great family can create healthy, happy young adults. But far too many kids don’t get that opportunity, and pay the price for it. In 2019, 122,216 children in the US adoption system were waiting to be adopted. Young people who age-out of the foster care system without being adopted are over-represented in rates of incarceration, suicide and substance abuse.

Granted, for some kids it’s a better alternative to the families they would have grew up in, but again: it’s an unideal situation. An unideal situation that can very easily be avoided with abortion. Why would a person choose 9 months of labor, plus all the emotional labor of having to give your child away to a system that more likely than not will eat them alive, knowing they will grow up asking themselves why they weren’t good enough for their birth parents, when the person could… simply not have that baby and not invite all that pain?

To summarize:

It is definitively not in anyone’s best interests to force unwilling and unprepared parents to have an unwanted child. It’s also not a good idea to get too deep into the technicalities of when an embryo is a fetus or when you’re allowed or not allowed to abort it. We need to focus on the women who are actually getting abortions. Having a baby is a huge life adjustment. Keep it, and you’re taking on an 18-year responsibility. You are responsible for another person’s wellbeing, and your life will never be the same.

In three months (about 12 weeks), a potential mother can: find out that they’re pregnant (missing periods is extremely common. A lot of women only find out they’re pregnant at two months, or 8 weeks), think about their financial, professional, social, romantic, or whatever situation and figure out what would be the best course of action, and then actually get the abortion if she chooses to. 12 weeks is enough, 12 weeks is reasonable, 12 weeks is humane. Nobody wants third-trimester abortions unless there are serious, life threatening complications.

The pro-life argument is reduced down to: well, abortion is bad! That’s a little innocent baby. It didn’t hurt anyone. Well, we agree: abortion is bad. It’s not a good thing, it’s not something people want to have to do. Nobody looks forward to giving or receiving an abortion, it’s physically painful and often heart-breaking. But is it as bad as forcing a woman to go through nine months of excruciating, potentially life-threatening labor for a child she doesn’t even want to have? Is it as bad as enforcing serious health, financial, emotional, social, and professional risks on a woman who knows she is in no way ready to give a baby the life it deserves? Is it worse than having to wake up every day with a heavy pit in your stomach because you can’t feed your little girl since you had to drop out of high school to take care of her? Worse than having to give your baby away to an adoption center, where they’re likely to join the hundreds of thousands of unadopted children? There are evils, and then there are greater evils. Abortion may not be ideal, but for some people, it’s the best option out there. When broken down, the pro-life argument is nothing but sad, provocative videos & descriptions of surgical abortions intended to pull at your heartstrings. But they’re sometimes the best option for the mother and her unborn baby. Nobody is pro-abortion — we’re pro-choice.

[addictivegerard]

why the prolife argument makes no sense

I think it’s hilarious how right wing “facts don’t care about your feelings” activists are almost always pro-life. The argument against abortion as an accessible form of birth control is 100% an emotional appeal, and here’s why:

1. “You have no right to kill your fetus. It’s not your body, the baby is an individual and has the right to life.”: 

Of course, all embryos are human individuals, separate from their mothers. They have their own unique DNA composition, and are definitely alive. But do they deserve the right to life, which would make abortion equivalent to murder?

Pro-lifers are largely okay with IVF, an industry that throws away and destroys millions of fertilized embryos every day. In-vitro fertilization is an uncertain science, so couples are advised to fertilize multiple eggs in the labs in case the first few don’t work out. If a couple succeeds and have extra embryos left, they have the option to continue paying to store them in the lab, donate them to medical research, or destroy them. 

Anti-abortion bills always have exceptions for IVF clinics. Republican, pro-life lawmakers have literally had children via IVF. If a pro-lifer ever tells you that life begins at conception and that every embryo has the right to life, know that it’s bullshit. They don’t care about an industry that kills more embryos in a day than Planned Parenthood does in a year.

2. There are two possible responses to this.

A) “Fine, let’s ban IVF.” Out of all the conservative groups in America, only one major group explicitly stands against IVF – the Catholic Church. The same organization that condemns sex before marriage, homosexuality, divorce, masturbation/porn, the use of condoms, getting drunk or high, and tattoos. At this point, I’m assuming you understand that the Church’s ideas of morality are regressive, illogical, primitive, and… make life extremely boring. IVF is a wonderful science that brings children to parents who want them all over the world and is in no way a bad thing.

B) “Fine. Maybe not at conception, but at [x] months, it’s a baby.” This is the point where most conservatives start arguing about the point up till you should be allowed to have an abortion. Two weeks? Six weeks? Three months? Unfortunately, there is no scientific way to determine when an embryo is no longer just a clump of cells and now a human being with rights.

Since pro-lifers are okay with IVF, we can assume they don’t believe in the right to life at conception. How about the heartbeat theory? At six weeks, the fetus develops a heartbeat, and proponents argue that it is the point at which the fetus is no longer simply a fetus, but a human being. However, having a heartbeat doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right to life.

Legally, if you are brain dead, you’re… dead. You no longer have the right to life, which is why organ donation is possible. All this while having a heartbeat, so that’s clearly not a viable hallmark of an individual that inherently has the right to life. So while it's true that at six weeks a baby develops (what is flimsily termed as) a heartbeat, that doesn't somehow give it rights to life that it did not have before. So far, I haven’t come across any other sensible theories as to “when” an embryo deserves the right to life. It’s a lousy concept to begin with, as blurry as the legal definition of adulthood – not all 18+ year olds are mature and nothing fundamentally changes in a person once the clock strikes midnight. Similarly, embryo development is a process. There’s really no point at which you can logically claim it’s transformed into a human being with rights.

3. Evidently, there are two extremes — life begins at conception, vs life doesn’t begin until birth. 

There’s no “scientific backing” for a point in between, but you’ll never find a pro-choice advocate arguing in favor of the latter, because it’s called an extreme for a reason. The best way to deal with the abortion issue at this point is to leave the science and technicalities alone, and think about the people who are actually getting abortions.

4. “Use protection and you won’t get pregnant”: 

Protection is never 100% reliable. Plus: if two people are irresponsible enough to have unprotected sex, what makes you think they’re responsible enough to have and raise children? The number of children growing up with unqualified, immature, abusive, or neglectful parents automatically disproves the theory that parenthood brings about a sense of personal responsibility. Being raised by bad parents inflicts often irreparable damage on children. Treating babies as some sort of “divine punishment” for irresponsible sex, instead of human beings who deserve a stable upbringing, is harmful on both an individual and collective scale. The data on irresponsible, neglectful, or abusive childhoods/single parent childhoods speaks for itself. In the quest to punish irresponsible parents, most of the damage is inflicted on their children, which in turn impacts the generation that will lead us forward into the future. It is in our best interests to raise as many mature, healthy, and productive young adults as possible, and while not every child born into these circumstances live lives of mental health/psychological/intimacy issues and criminal behavior, a large majority do. Growing up with bad parents is simply not ideal for an impressionable child’s wellbeing. Quality of life > quantity of life.

5. “Don’t have sex if you don’t want to have children.”:

Unhelpful, unrealistic, and telling of no real desire to solve the problem at hand. Telling people not to have sex unless they deliberately intend to have children is like telling people not to smoke, drink too much, or eat unhealthily. People will have sex. What are we going to do to make sure the sex doesn’t lead to unplanned pregnancies?

6. “Okay but what about xyz who had an abortion and has regretted it ever since?”: 

Abortion is a result of unplanned and unfortunate circumstances. Whether it’s because the doctor tells you your baby will be stillborn or born with a fatal illness, or if you were raped, or if you had sex with your boyfriend during your first year of college and found yourself pregnant: these are bad situations, and no matter what you do, there’s always a chance you’ll look back and wish you’d done things differently. Kept the baby? Well, maybe you’ll find that the baby brought newfound purpose to your life. But maybe the baby added an additional financial strain to your life and forced you to quit your job, leaving you destitute and homeless with no way to feed it. Alternatively, if you got an abortion, maybe you end up being able to finish college and fulfil all your goals... or maybe you regret that decision for the rest of your life. There’s no way to guarantee that you’re making the right decision, but being informed about your options, and having options available, makes it more likely that you do. That’s why we are advocating for informed choice. Whether they eventually choose to keep the baby or have an abortion, give women the time and resources to truly evaluate their options and do what’s best for them in their own circumstances.

7. “Why kill the baby? Put it up for adoption.”: 

The adoption system is known for being isolating, exploitative, and unhealthy for children growing up in it. Being adopted into a great family can create healthy, happy young adults. But far too many kids don’t get that opportunity, and pay the price for it. In 2019, 122,216 children in the US adoption system were waiting to be adopted. Young people who age-out of the foster care system without being adopted are over-represented in rates of incarceration, suicide and substance abuse.

Granted, for some kids it’s a better alternative to the families they would have grew up in, but again: it’s an unideal situation. An unideal situation that can very easily be avoided with abortion. Why would a person choose 9 months of labor, plus all the emotional labor of having to give your child away to a system that more likely than not will eat them alive, knowing they will grow up asking themselves why they weren’t good enough for their birth parents, when the person could… simply not have that baby and not invite all that pain?

8. “It doesn’t matter, no one has the right to take another life.”:

Here’s another way of looking at the abortion question: the fetus is in a position where its existence impinges on its mother’s bodily integrity, and it stays in that position until the point of viability (at which it could plausibly survive outside the mother’s body) at about 24 weeks. One person’s bodily integrity will always override another person’s right to life; this is a fundamental truth. Otherwise, we would have mandatory kidney and liver donations. People all over the world are dying due to a lack of kidneys or other organs - why should we be allowed to keep both of ours when one of them could save someone’s life? 

Let’s say I caused a car accident that resulted in someone needing a kidney donation. It’s my fault they’re in that position, and I was negligent - should I be legally obligated to give mine up?

If the idea of being forced to donate one of your kidneys sounds violating, you’re closer to understanding why forcing someone to have a baby is such a barbaric thing to do. Even if the risk is small - kidney donations have a death rate of about 0.03% while childbirth is at 0.02% in the US - it’s still wrong to force something so invasive and risky onto someone against their will. Additionally, there are many complications that can arise from pregnancy short of death, just like there can be consequences to living your life with only one kidney down the line.

To summarize:

It is definitively not in anyone’s best interests to force unwilling and unprepared parents to have an unwanted child. It’s also not a good idea to get too deep into the technicalities of when an embryo is a fetus or when you’re allowed or not allowed to abort it. We need to focus on the women who are actually getting abortions. Having a baby is a huge life adjustment. Keep it, and you’re taking on an 18-year responsibility. You are responsible for another person’s wellbeing, and your life will never be the same. 

In three months (about 12 weeks), a potential mother can: find out that they’re pregnant (missing periods is extremely common. A lot of women only find out they’re pregnant at two months, or 8 weeks), think about their financial, professional, social, romantic, or whatever situation and figure out what would be the best course of action, and then actually get the abortion if she chooses to. 12 weeks is enough, 12 weeks is reasonable, 12 weeks is humane. Nobody wants third-trimester abortions unless there are serious, life threatening complications.

The pro-life argument is reduced down to: well, abortion is bad! That's a little innocent baby. It didn't hurt anyone. Well, we agree: abortion is bad. It’s not a good thing, it’s not something people want to have to do. Nobody looks forward to giving or receiving an abortion, it’s physically painful and often heart-breaking. But is it as bad as forcing a woman to go through hours of excruciating, potentially life-threatening labor for a child she doesn't even want to have? Is it as bad as enforcing serious health, financial, emotional, social, and professional risks on a woman who knows she is in no way ready to give a baby the life it deserves? Is it worse than having to drop out of school with no way to feed your child? Worse than having to give your baby away to an adoption center, where they’re likely to join the hundreds of thousands of unadopted children? There are evils, and then there are greater evils. Abortion may not be ideal, but for some people, it's the best option out there. When broken down, the pro-life argument is nothing but sad, provocative videos & descriptions of surgical abortions intended to pull at your heartstrings. But they’re sometimes the best option for the mother and her unborn baby. Nobody is pro-abortion — we’re pro-choice.

[jbauer21ahsgov]

Political Interest Groups and PACs Assessment

Interest Group

Name: Center for Reproductive Rights

Mission: The Center of Reproductive Rights mission is to use law to make reproductive rights equal to fundamental human rights across the world.

 Advocacies: 

Their goal is to expand access to reproductive healthcare resources such as birth control, prenatal and obstetric care, safe abortion, and unbiased information and education about their reproductive rights and resources.

The center documents abuses, work with policymakers in order to promote reproductive freedom, and foster legal scholarships to teach people about reproductive health and human rights.

The center initiated “El Golpe” in Ecuador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua at the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The goals of this launch in 2019 were to reform abortion laws in the area, especially young teenagers experiencing young and unplanned pregnancies being denied abortion.

The center supports Kansas Governor Laura Kelly in her ruling for the right to personal autonomy, including the right to abortion, being strengthened apart from what is mentioned in the Constitution.

The center has assisted the High Court in Kenya’s decision making surrounding abortion laws, making availability to education and processes more accessible, unbiased, and supportive of women seeking safe abortion.

Endorsed Legislation: In August 2020, the Center worked with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the Paola Guzmán Albarracín v. Ecuador case. This case was the Court’s first sexual abuse in a school setting case. The Center of Reproductive Rights partnered and brought this case to the Court and clarified her right to equality, non-discrimination, education, and right to live without gender violence. The Center was successful in this case and additionally raised awareness about how often cases such as these occur, but are left unaddressed. 

Location/Opportunities: The Center for Reproductive Rights headquarter is in New York City, but is available in media across the US and world. I was not able to find any local opportunities or dates for future meetings to join.

Volunteer Opportunities: The website is somewhat unclear of where or when they meet together locally, although they have frequent marches globally, made up of smaller gatherings off the larger interest group. These marches and protests are often in San Francisco and bordering cities.

Additional Development: The Center helped to expand access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in Maryland around June 2020. This allows unmarried individuals and couples to have insurance coverage for IVF, which helps them carry out a safe transfer between the sperm sample and transferred embryos.

Super PAC

Name: Women Vote!

Goal: This PAC’s goal is to persuade and enable women to vote more women into power, specifically those who are pro-choice and Democratic. 

Money Raised: They have raised $36,262,453 total and $31,985,958 in independent expenditures.

Money Raised For/Against Democrats/Republicans: $10,649,774 have been spent for Democrats. $2,436,841 have been spent against Democrats. $0 have been spent for Republicans. $18,889,343 have been spent against Republicans. This is generally what I expected to see, although I am a bit confused as to why there are so many Republicans who support and donate to this program despite zero dollars from this PAC being for them. From what I have read so far, Democrats are much more progressive when it comes to women’s rights and their place in office and power, so seeing how much money is in support of Democrats makes sense.

Donors: Thomas Secunda (Bloomberg), Laura Ricketts (business woman), Laurie Michaels (psychologist), Michelle Mercer (leadership consultant), Jeffrey Walker (philanthropist). Most of the people listed are not well known, but are very generous to the cause of letting more women into power. Ricketts, for example, is a business woman herself, which makes sense why she would want more women in the corporate world. Mercer is a leadership consultant, likely making her trustworthy to know what kind of people should be in power (women in this case). This shows that this PAC has a lot of generous donors who actually work in this area and are dedicated to the women’s movement and advancement of diversity in government, which is really cool! The majority of the donors’ jobs are focused around other’s well-beings and business, which shows a lot about the values of the Women Vote! PAC.

[wp-yahoo-style-1042-yahoopa-blog]

Female lawmakers react to Kavanaugh with #SaveScotus — and gear up for the 'fight of our lives'

Tammy Duckworth, Kamala Harris, Dianne Feinstein (Photo: Getty Images)

The announcement of Brett Kavanaugh as President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee on Monday night sparked a diverse array of reactions — on the web and off. There was praise from right-wing politicians and disdain from those on the left. There were scathing reactions about the implications for Roe v. Wade, and glowing reviews of the judge’s commitment to Catholicism.

Kavanaugh, 53, himself offered a review of his own record during the speech, specifically touching on what he describes as a track record of empowering women. He insisted that he’s committed to women — whether it’s his two young daughters, or the majority-female law clerks that he’s “proudly” appointed during his time as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Distict of Columbia Circuit.

His remarks on women, however heartfelt, did little to assuage concerns among female lawmakers. In the hours after the announcement, the women of Washington spelled out their concerns about the choice, ranging from women’s rights to immigration.

The concerns are likely to be used to try to sway the two Republican senators who could prove to be the pivotal votes against Kavanaugh: Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. But while a vote is likely to be far off, for many lawmakers, the fight has already begun. Just minutes after the announcement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and others marched out to join a crowd of protesters on the steps of the Supreme Court, wearing pro-choice shirts. “We are in the fight of our lives,” Warren told the crowd. 

From last night to this morning, here is a look at what the women in Washington have to say.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

Trump’s Supreme Court Justice nominee, Judge Kavanaugh, represents a direct and fundamental threat to the rights and health care of hundreds of millions of Americans. I will oppose his nomination to the Supreme Court. #SCOTUSpick

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 10, 2018

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.

If Trump succeeds, it won’t only affect people like me who could be prevented from having children through IVF; the impacts will be felt by everyone. Whoever replaces Justice Kennedy will play a critical role in the lives of all women and every single American #SCOTUSpick

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) July 10, 2018

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D- Mass.

Brett Kavanaugh's record as a judge and lawyer is clear: hostile to health care for millions, opposed to the CFPB & corporate accountability, thinks Presidents like Trump are above the law – and conservatives are confident that he would overturn Roe v. Wade. I'll be voting no.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 10, 2018

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Brett Kavanaugh's views are far outside the mainstream when it comes to health care, executive power, privacy and gun safety. We need a nominee who understands that the court must protect the rights of all Americans, not just political interest groups and the powerful. #SCOTUS

— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) July 10, 2018

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii

Judge Kavanaugh has already been vetted by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation– two far-right organizations whose goals include repealing the Affordable Care Act & attacking women's health. Proud to stand with @JudiciaryDems to lay out #WhatsAtStake. pic.twitter.com/LdzE1rQxrR

— Senator Mazie Hirono (@maziehirono) July 10, 2018

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, D.C.

It was watching the Clarence Thomas hearings—and seeing how my voice and the voices of people like me all across the country weren’t being heard—that got me to run for the Senate in the first place.

We have to keep making our voices heard. pic.twitter.com/sJLZKxGAy1

— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) July 10, 2018

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

.@realDonaldTrump is using this nomination as a destructive tool on a generation of progress for workers, women, LGBTQ people, communities of color & families, & to radically reverse the course of American justice & democracy. #WhatsAtStake #StopKavanaugh https://t.co/lUDbzInQZ3 pic.twitter.com/oq6954uChh

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) July 10, 2018

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s views are far outside the mainstream of the American public. His confirmation could have profound negative consequences for women. Judge Kavanaugh could accelerate the drift to favor corporations over Americans. I urge my Senate colleagues to reject him.

— Rep. Zoe Lofgren (@RepZoeLofgren) July 10, 2018

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.

My statement on President Trump's nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court: pic.twitter.com/25a7vKumBq

— Sen. Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan) July 10, 2018

Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn.

I'm on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court speaking out against Judge Kavanaugh's nomination to be a U.S. Supreme Court Judge. We need a Justice who will protect the rights of all Americans. Make no mistake—Judge Kavanaugh is not that Justice. https://t.co/AQLRvIcded

— Senator Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) July 10, 2018

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[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

No, Donald Trump is not “flip-flopping” on abortion as some corporate media headlines are claiming. But the silver lining to this debate is that it elevates the issue of reproductive freedom to the forefront in the closing months of the campaign—reminding people Trump was “honored” to “kill” Roe v. Wade and that his abortion bans are literally killing women. What sparked the headlines about Trump’s so-called “flip-flop” on abortion was when Trump first stated last week that he opposed the GOP enacted six week abortion ban in Florida. Trump told Fox News this six-week ban was a “mistake,” adding, "I think six weeks, you need more time.” However, after the pro-forced birth activists and Christian nationalists expressed outrage, Trump reversed course, saying he would vote no on the proposed Florida ballot measure that would repeal the state's six-week abortion ban.

Trump did not “evolve” on the issue of reproductive freedom. In reality, he has no core beliefs other than racism and sexism. The convicted felon simply sees the same polls and election results we have when it comes to abortion. Trump gets that a recent Gallup poll found only 12% of Americans support the GOP’s total abortion bans—while 85% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or certain circumstances.  Add to that, a recent CNN poll found nearly two thirds of Americans oppose the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Trump simply wanted to appear more reasonable on abortion given new polls show Americans overwhelmingly trust VP Harris to handle the issue of reproductive freedom--which has contributed to a record gender gap.  This explains Trump’s latest proposal regarding in vitro fertilization (IVF) that he claims will force insurance companies to pay for the costs of in vitro fertilization (IVF.) I’m sure we will see this “amazing” IVF plan the same time we see Trump’s “great” healthcare plan that he repeatedly promised since 2015 he would be unveiling in “two weeks.” Never happened.

Trump’s new IVF is not even original--he stole it from the Democrats. In June, Senate Democrats proposed legislation known as the Right to IVF Act that would have both enshrined into federal law a right for individuals to receive IVF treatment and would’ve mandated coverage for fertility treatments under health insurance plans. In other words, what Trump says he now wants to do. However, that legislation was blocked by all but two Senate Republicans included Trump’s own running mate, JD Vance.

What Trump and the GOP don’t get—or care to grasp—is that stripping women of a 50-year constitutional right to reproductive freedom is not a political issue, it’s personal. In fact, nothing is more personal than Republican laws that force women against their will to carry a fetus to term. And that is exactly what Republicans have done in 14 states they control with their total abortion bans that in essence mean on day one of pregnancy, a women’s uterus becomes property of the GOP.  (An additional eight GOP controlled states have also implemented abortion bans still far more restrictive than under Roe v. Wade.) These abortion bans—as studies have now detailed—are literally killing women. One study found that “women in states with abortion bans are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth.” A July study found that “the highest rates of maternal mortality can be found in the Mississippi Delta, which includes Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.” These states—as well as Texas and others--all have extreme abortion bans that have resulted in preventing women from receiving an abortion to address a women’s health needs. Rather, a woman must be on the doorstep of death before doctors are permitted by law to perform an abortion to save her life.

Abortion bans are harming and killing women, point blank. These have the imprimatur of Trump-appointed justices and GOP legislators across the nation, along with Trump himself.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

““How strange — all 49 Republicans are willing to sign a piece of paper saying they like IVF, but virtually none of them seem willing to actually vote for a bill that protects IVF,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday. “It shows you how afraid they are of the issue, but how they’re tied in a knot by the MAGA hard-right on choice, and they can’t do anything that the American people want.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Pavlovitz at The Beautiful Mess:

So, what is actually happening here?

In the wake of the first presidential debate, I’ve watched members of the media, high profile talking heads, and millions of voters frantically pushing the panic button, calling for Joe Biden to step down and encouraging sky-is-falling histrionics. Now, I expect this from a cultic Republican Party prostrate before a traitorous sociopath and a myopic media intoxicated on the circus of sewage he daily generates, but seeing it from supposedly rational people who claim to be awake and paying attention to the issues is disheartening. Yes, Joe Biden is old. He was old when he won four years ago. He’s also an intelligent, compassionate, reasonable human being who has served this nation faithfully and is currently serving it at an extremely high level.

He is a proven leader who understands the diplomacy, nuance, and compromise required to get things accomplished. He deftly led this nation following an insurrection, through COVID, and out of an inflation that much of the world is still in the throes of. He has continued to combat price gouging, student loan debt, gas prices, and a myriad of attacks on human rights, while contending with the most openly corrupt, brazenly traitorous, and violently predatory cadre of Republicans in Congress in our history. And the most shortsighted (and frankly ignorant move) for any Americans of voting age not swept up in the MAGA cult, is making this about Joe Biden alone to begin with. This is about the team of qualified and responsible adults he has surrounded himself with and the agenda of his party as a whole—which when contrasted with the alternative shouldn’t require a second thought.

Joe Biden is old. Republicans stacked the Supreme Court with lawless monsters. Joe Biden is old. Republicans joyously overturned Roe V Wade and are targeting IVF and birth control. Joe Biden is old. Republicans are putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Joe Biden is old. Republicans are coming for marriage rights, voting rights, Social Security, and Medicare. Joe Biden is old. Republicans are legislating the Bible. Joe Biden is old. Republicans are banning books and outlawing gender-affirming care. Joe Biden is old. Republicans are protecting guns instead of school children. Joe Biden is old. Republicans are planning Project 2025 to immediately establish theocracy. Joe Biden is old. Donald Trump is a court-established rapist and fraud who paid off off a porn star he was sleeping with in order to manipulate an election, and he is likely guilty of high crimes against this nation and is being shielded by judges who are beholden to him.

[...] If the Dems lose in November, America loses. And if the Dems lose, it won't be Joe Biden or the DNC who will be to blame. It will be Left-leaning voters who allowed the media and the Right to manipulate them into fueling the firestorm of meaningless distractions of age and public speaking prowess—when they should have focused on the human, civil, and environmental protections they will be pissing away with a Republican victory. The sole reason Biden ran in 2020 was that he saw the urgency of the moment, realized Trump would likely win, and wanted to spare America a second disastrous second term—and he did. It seems far too many people want to toss this fact aside as prisoners of the momentary news cycle. If President Biden decides to step out of the race then we should passionately embrace whoever replaces him but until that moment comes or if it does not, he and his Administration and party are all that stands between America and its demise.

President Joe Biden (D) has my support as long as he is our party's nominee. If he decides to step down or quit the race, then VP Kamala Harris or whoever Biden and the DNC pick to be the nominee has full support, as defeating Donald Trump and his plans for lawless tyranny is imperative to keep America free.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trudy Ring at The Advocate:

The controversy over gender-affirming care for trans minors is coming to the U.S. Supreme Court in its new term, which begins Monday — the first Monday in October. A hearing date has not been set, but the case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, over a Tennessee ban on such care, will surely attract much attention when it comes to the court. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups representing the Tennesseans who sued over the law, predicts the hearing will be scheduled for December. Here’s what you need to know about the case, which is the high court’s first opportunity to rule on the issue.

What is the U.S. v. Skrmetti Supreme Court case?

In March 2023, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, signed Senate Bill 1 into law. It bans surgery, puberty blockers, and hormone treatment for the purpose of gender transition for people under 18. The following month, three families with transgender children and one doctor filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law. The suit was brought by Samantha and Brian Williams of Nashville and their 15-year-old transgender daughter, two other plaintiff families filing anonymously, and Dr. Susan Lacy of Memphis. They are represented by Lambda Legal, the ACLU and its Tennessee affiliate, and the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. The suit was filed in April 2023 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.

It names as defendants Skrmetti, the Tennessee Department of Health, the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners, and various state officials. The suit argues that the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process as well as the Affordable Care Act’s Section 1557, which bans sex discrimination in health care, the suit asserts.

[...]

What's at stake here for gender-affirming care?

“Our legal challenge is limited to the provisions of Tennessee’s ban targeting hormone therapies — such as hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers — and does not implicate surgical care,” the ACLU explains on its website, as genital surgery is almost never performed on minors. “Tennessee’s ban, like every other passed by politicians in recent years, specifically permits these same hormone medications when they are provided in a way that Tennessee considers ‘consistent’ with a person’s sex designated at birth,” the ACLU continues. “This means, for example, a doctor could prescribe estrogen to a cisgender teenage girl for any clinical diagnosis but could not do the same for a transgender girl diagnosed with gender dysphoria.” A ruling upholding the law could have implications for other types of health care, the ACLU warns. “When arguing against transgender people and their families, states with bans like Tennessee’s have relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s opinion Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to ban abortion,” the organization notes. “U.S. v. Skrmetti will be a major test of how far the court is willing to stretch Dobbs to allow states to ban other health care. The court’s ruling could serve as a stepping stone towards further limiting access to abortion, IVF, and birth control.”

A big case on gender-affirming care for trans youths (and adults) is on the Supreme Court docket this term, and likely to be decided next June is the United States v. Skrmetti case. The case could have massive ramifications for trans rights, especially the gender-affirming care aspect.

[douxlen]

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

New Post has been published on https://douxle.com/2024/08/10/ivf-changed-america-but-its-future-is-under-threat-3/

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

In February, a horrified Elizabeth Carr scrolled through headline after headline about a pause on in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in Alabama. The Alabama Supreme Court had ruled that frozen embryos have the legal rights of children, a decision that meant fertility providers could feasibly face prosecution if they destroyed one. Rather than take that risk, some fertility clinics halted IVF services entirely.

Carr, who in 1981 became the first baby in the U.S. born using IVF, felt like “an endangered species.” When Carr was born, IVF—a process of fertilizing eggs outside a woman’s body, then implanting a resulting embryo in her uterus—was new and largely unknown. Carr’s parents, who desperately wanted children but struggled to have them naturally, were willing to face public scrutiny and repeatedly travel from their home in Massachusetts to a pioneering clinic in Virginia to try the cutting-edge procedure. IVF’s success for the Carrs led not only to their daughter’s historic birth, but also compelled Elizabeth to become an advocate for reproductive rights when she grew up. Over those recent days in February, when patients in Alabama were shut out of fertility clinics, Carr acutely felt the importance of her work. Moments like those, she says, are “why we advocate so loudly.”

After public outcry and bipartisan pushback, Alabama lawmakers quickly passed protections for IVF providers, and services resumed. But IVF is still under attack.

Despite the backlash, judges in Alabama declined to reconsider their controversial ruling. And more than a dozen other U.S. states have laws in place that could be interpreted as bestowing personhood rights on an embryo, even if it has not yet resulted in a pregnancy. Courts in other states haven’t yet applied these laws in ways that directly threaten IVF—although Louisiana law forces fertility providers to ship embryos out of state for destruction—but the possibility is there if the wrong case comes before the wrong judge, says Rebecca Reingold, an associate director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Right now, it is politically unpopular to attack IVF, a technology that has given life to millions of people and hope to some of the one in six adults worldwide with infertility. Only 8% of U.S. adults actively oppose access to IVF, according to recent polling, and even lawmakers from states that have cracked down on abortion, like Texas, have introduced bills to protect IVF.

And yet, in June, Republican senators—including former President Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance—voted against a bill that would have established a federal right to IVF care. The same month, members of the Southern Baptist church voted to oppose the use of IVF, a decision that has no legal ramifications but signals a growing willingness among religious conservatives to embrace prenatal personhood concepts that effectively place IVF in the same category as abortion.

How did we get here? And where are we going? 

Growing anti-IVF sentiment

The concept of prenatal personhood isn’t new, but it has historically been unpopular. In a 2013 legal journal article, reproductive-rights expert Maya Manian argued that’s because “public concern over the ‘side effects’ of personhood laws”—such as infringing on fertility care, contraception access, and women’s health care more broadly—“seems to have persuaded even those opposed to abortion to reject personhood legislation.” It was, in other words, a step too far for most people.

In a relatively short span of time, however, the idea has gone from “radical or fringe” to one that is gaining ground, Reingold says. It has even transcended the anti-abortion movement, with ex-spouses in some cases using the concept to argue that frozen embryos should be treated by the courts as children, not marital property, during divorce proceedings. As such ideas snowball, IVF may become the next frontier in the battle over reproductive rights, advocates and scholars say.

Read More: The Silent Shame of Male Infertility

“It’s clear to us—it always has been—that the anti-abortion movement has not, and will not, stop their efforts at limiting or banning abortion,” says Karla Torres, who leads the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights’ work on assisted reproductive technology. They are “squarely targeting reproductive freedom more broadly,” drawing everything from IVF to contraception into the fray.

If IVF becomes harder to access, it’s hard to overstate the effect for American families and culture at large. About 2% of babies born in the U.S. in recent years—nearly 100,000 annually—arrived with the help of IVF. But the technology’s impact transcends statistics. In about a half century of use, it has reshaped what it means to be a parent, who gets to be one, and how—progress that’s now under threat.

A confusing position

In some ways, IVF is an unlikely target. The technology enables people to have badly wanted biological children, a sentiment that could be seen as having a “conservative traditional family aspect to it,” says Amanda Roth, an associate professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at the State University of New York at Geneseo. The importance of having children is a regular conservative talking point—see: Vance recently calling child-free women “cat ladies” without a “direct stake” in the future of America—and IVF makes it possible for more people to do that.

But many in the anti-abortion movement argue that life begins at the moment of conception—that is, the moment sperm fertilizes an egg to create an embryo, either the old-fashioned way or in a laboratory. (A fertilized egg is considered an embryo until the end of the 10th week of pregnancy, when it becomes a fetus.)

To that effect, about a third of U.S. states currently have laws that establish prenatal personhood rights at some stage of pregnancy, usually as a means of curtailing access to abortion by establishing that terminating a pregnancy is tantamount to killing a child. Nine of these laws, such as those in Arkansas, Kansas, and Tennessee, are either sweeping enough or vaguely worded enough that they could put IVF services at risk, according to analysis from the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice provided to TIME. Six additional states, including the Dakotas, Michigan, and Oklahoma, have either feticide or wrongful death laws broad enough to potentially apply to embryos. And there’s always the possibility of new laws: already in 2024, more than a dozen bills focused on prenatal personhood have been introduced across the U.S.

Read More: The Abortion Fight Isn’t a ‘War on Women.’ It’s a War on Poor Women

Greer Donley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies abortion law, doesn’t think curtailing access to IVF is a “priority” for the anti-abortion movement, but rather an “unfortunate side effect that [anti-abortion advocates] haven’t been able to account for.” It’s a narrative problem: to argue an embryo in a mother’s womb is a person, but one sitting in a fertility clinic freezer isn’t, would weaken the movement’s argument. So, despite the cognitive dissonance, IVF has become “collateral damage” in the abortion wars, Donley believes.

Whether the situation was intentional or not, threats to IVF are real. The Alabama Supreme Court demonstrated as much in February, when it ruled that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to not-yet-implanted embryos, prompting fertility clinics to pause IVF services for fear that patients or providers could be legally liable if embryos were destroyed in the course of care. That’s not an irrational fear: embryos are destroyed all the time in the fertility world, either purposely (perhaps because a patient no longer wishes to pay for storage, or because the embryo is unlikely to result in a healthy pregnancy) or because of human error.

Accidents happen, says Dr. Gerard Letterie, a reproductive endocrinologist at Seattle Reproductive Medicine who has written about the potential impact of fetal personhood laws on clinicians. An embryo could be destroyed through an innocent mistake, like someone tripping while carrying a petri dish. “If that were to be made a felony charge, that’s a big deal,” Letterie says.

In that scenario, clinics might stop services entirely to avoid putting providers in legal jeopardy, as happened in Alabama. Or, even if services proceeded, providers might stop practicing in states with punitive laws, Letterie says, making access to fertility care as scattershot as access to abortion care. Already, fertility clinics tend to be clustered in wealthier urban areas.

Read More: Why It’s So Hard to Have Your Fertility Tested

Even short of criminal charges for providers, prenatal personhood laws could affect fertility practices, Letterie says. He can imagine policies that limit the number of eggs that may be fertilized per cycle to avoid creating extra embryos that ultimately end up discarded. Such policies—the likes of which have already been implemented elsewhere in the world, such as in Malta—could reduce the odds of patients getting pregnant, since not all embryos are viable, and force people to go through more rounds of treatment, making IVF more expensive and inaccessible than it already is. IVF can already cost upward of $10,000 per cycle without insurance, and coverage varies by state and insurance provider. If costs go up even more, Letterie says, IVF would be inaccessible to virtually everyone who isn’t mega-wealthy or lucky to have excellent health insurance.

Even taking finances out of the picture, threats to IVF have particularly high stakes for certain people. Those who stand to lose the most are those for whom IVF has been revolutionary over its half century of use: namely same-sex couples, people with medical infertility, and those who have decided to have children without a partner or later in life. “The existence of reproductive technologies has opened up new horizons for family life,” says Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University and author of Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. In a future without reliable access to IVF, the possibilities of what families can look like might shrink.

A crossroads for U.S. culture

IVF and other fertility services helped break open the narrow definition of family that dominated for so long—a married man and woman and their naturally conceived children—to reveal a whole world of options. A mother can be 45 and single, even if she’s survived cancer or had her fallopian tubes removed or needs to use a donor egg to get pregnant. Same-sex couples can use “reciprocal” IVF to incorporate both of their genetic material. A child can even have three biological parents, a controversial technique that is not currently legal in the U.S. but is in several other countries.

“We’ve seen a significant diversification in how people understand kinship, relatedness, and parenting,” says Sarah Franklin, who directs the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. 

This progress has not been equally felt around the world. Compared to the U.S., Europe and Asia have historically employed stricter regulations on the use of reproductive technologies like IVF. Although some of those policies have loosened in recent years, single and older women, trans and non-binary people, and/or same-sex couples are still barred from using reproductive technologies in countries including China, Poland, Turkey, and Italy. And in many poorer countries, including most of the ones in Africa, there is next to no access to IVF at all.

Even in the U.S., where IVF is much more broadly used, reproductive medicine has not wiped out persistent stereotypes and social norms, says Arthur Greil, a professor emeritus at Alfred University in New York and author of Not Yet Pregnant: Infertile Couples in Contemporary America. People are willing to pay IVF’s exorbitant fees, at least in part, because society still emphasizes the importance of a genetic relationship between parent and child, Greil says. And, he says, the knee-jerk assumption is still that a child has both a mother and father. “If you are a single woman with a child, people just assume that you must have been divorced,” Greil says. “It’s become impolite to ask questions like, ‘Where is the baby’s father?’ But people still have the questions.”

Read More: I Was Told I Was Too Fat to Freeze My Eggs

Still, IVF has made what was once impossible—or, at the very least, difficult or done outside the scope of mainstream medicine—possible for many people. Sex, age, and medical diagnoses don’t necessarily close the road to biological parenthood anymore; they are just speed bumps. Reproductive technologies are expensive and imperfect, working only about half the time in the best circumstances and becoming even less of a sure bet among patients who are older or relying on donated embryos. But it has made the possibility of biological parenthood real for swaths of the population that, a century ago, would have had zero or few options. “Fertility medicine has made all of us parents-in-waiting,” says Laura Mamo, a professor of public health at San Francisco State University who studies the intersection of sexuality and medicine.

The trickle-down effects can be seen throughout U.S. culture. Women, no longer so pressured by biological clocks to end their careers just as they’re advancing, now outnumber men in the college-educated workforce, and some employers offer fertility benefits to entice workers to stay longer. People are getting married later, if ever, freed from the need to settle for an imperfect partner to have a family. Queer parenthood is on the rise, and same-sex couples are making fertility equality a new social-justice issue, fighting for fair treatment by insurance providers and clinicians. Scientific advances in fertility medicine, like the ability to pick embryos by sex, are even raising important new bioethical dilemmas.

IVF is not solely responsible for those shifts—Franklin sees it more as a “mirror” reflecting major societal changes and conditions—but it plays a part. Making the technology harder or impossible to access, then, would have profound effects on countless people, particularly those from marginalized groups. And that, Mamo says, may be exactly the point for some people pushing forward the prenatal personhood movement.

“It’s not really about personhood,” Mamo says. “It’s really about this expansion of gender and family and sexuality and autonomy over people’s bodies.”

Fighting back

Already, legislators and reproductive-rights advocates are preparing for battle. In his first speech as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reaffirmed his commitment to protecting reproductive health care including IVF, a technology that he and his wife used to have their daughter, Hope. “When Vice President [Harris] and I talk about freedom, we talk about the freedom to make your own health care decisions,” Walz said.

Elsewhere, the Center for Reproductive Rights has for years been working with partner advocacy groups and legislators to expand access to IVF by implementing new state policies around fertility coverage and broadening those that already exist, which are often written in ways that exclude same-sex couples or people who aren’t cisgender. That work is continuing in earnest, Torres says. And in the aftermath of the Alabama decision, lawmakers in at least a dozen states introduced bills meant to either protect IVF providers from liability or specify that embryos outside the human body do not legally qualify as people, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights nonprofit. A broader package of pro-IVF bills moved forward at the federal level before being blocked by Republican senators in June.

Along with legislative solutions, the reproductive-rights movement is also trying to develop legal defenses that can be used to stop prenatal personhood arguments in court, says Donley, the Pittsburgh law professor. Judges may hold long-term appointments and don’t necessarily need to win elections—which means some can stray from public opinion with fewer consequences than elected officials. “I feel confident right now that the politics of reproductive rights are such that Republican legislatures aren’t going to pass anti-IVF bills,” Donley says. “Republican judges are another story. They get to do whatever they want.”

Read More: ‘I Don’t Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.’ Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

That means people who want to protect IVF access will need compelling legal arguments, says Georgetown’s Reingold. One, she says, could be pointing out the slippery slope of prenatal personhood. If an embryo is considered a person in one legal context, it could be considered one in many: a pregnant person could arguably claim their embryo as a tax dependent, a beneficiary for public assistance, or (in a lower-stakes scenario) another person for the purposes of driving in a carpool lane. Pointing out “consequences for other areas of the law that haven’t necessarily been completely thought through” could be an effective strategy for limiting the influence of fetal personhood arguments, Reingold says.

Another possible consequence: if an embryo is legally considered a person, a pregnant person could feasibly be criminalized for a miscarriage or pregnancy complication, says Kulsoom Ijaz, a senior staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice. Ijaz says she’s “cautiously optimistic” that pointing out such dystopian ripple effects would sway some judges and lawmakers. “It’s a matter of summoning defiant hope so that we…make sure there is no more rollback on people’s most basic civil and human rights,” she says.

There is some precedent to back Ijaz’ optimism. Even in the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the justices did not take a position on “if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” which could foreshadow a broader hesitation for judges throughout the U.S. court system to consider questions of legal personhood.

That reluctance may not last forever. But in the meantime, IVF advocates like Carr, the first U.S. person born using the technology, are leaning on some of the “best tools” they have: their own stories, which underscore how life-changing IVF can be for individuals, couples, and families. “I always knew there were people who didn’t agree with how I was born. Around age 10, I realized I can potentially educate people,” Carr says. “I feel very strongly, and I always have, that people fear things they don’t understand.”

The stakes of that education campaign are high. Carr’s birth was a historic first for the U.S. “I do not want to think about who could potentially be the last,” she says.

[douxlen]

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

New Post has been published on https://douxle.com/2024/08/10/ivf-changed-america-but-its-future-is-under-threat-2/

IVF Changed America. But Its Future Is Under Threat

In February, a horrified Elizabeth Carr scrolled through headline after headline about a pause on in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in Alabama. The Alabama Supreme Court had ruled that frozen embryos have the legal rights of children, a decision that meant fertility providers could feasibly face prosecution if they destroyed one. Rather than take that risk, some fertility clinics halted IVF services entirely.

Carr, who in 1981 became the first baby in the U.S. born using IVF, felt like “an endangered species.” When Carr was born, IVF—a process of fertilizing eggs outside a woman’s body, then implanting a resulting embryo in her uterus—was new and largely unknown. Carr’s parents, who desperately wanted children but struggled to have them naturally, were willing to face public scrutiny and repeatedly travel from their home in Massachusetts to a pioneering clinic in Virginia to try the cutting-edge procedure. IVF’s success for the Carrs led not only to their daughter’s historic birth, but also compelled Elizabeth to become an advocate for reproductive rights when she grew up. Over those recent days in February, when patients in Alabama were shut out of fertility clinics, Carr acutely felt the importance of her work. Moments like those, she says, are “why we advocate so loudly.”

After public outcry and bipartisan pushback, Alabama lawmakers quickly passed protections for IVF providers, and services resumed. But IVF is still under attack.

Despite the backlash, judges in Alabama declined to reconsider their controversial ruling. And more than a dozen other U.S. states have laws in place that could be interpreted as bestowing personhood rights on an embryo, even if it has not yet resulted in a pregnancy. Courts in other states haven’t yet applied these laws in ways that directly threaten IVF—although Louisiana law forces fertility providers to ship embryos out of state for destruction—but the possibility is there if the wrong case comes before the wrong judge, says Rebecca Reingold, an associate director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Right now, it is politically unpopular to attack IVF, a technology that has given life to millions of people and hope to some of the one in six adults worldwide with infertility. Only 8% of U.S. adults actively oppose access to IVF, according to recent polling, and even lawmakers from states that have cracked down on abortion, like Texas, have introduced bills to protect IVF.

And yet, in June, Republican senators—including former President Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance—voted against a bill that would have established a federal right to IVF care. The same month, members of the Southern Baptist church voted to oppose the use of IVF, a decision that has no legal ramifications but signals a growing willingness among religious conservatives to embrace prenatal personhood concepts that effectively place IVF in the same category as abortion.

How did we get here? And where are we going? 

Growing anti-IVF sentiment

The concept of prenatal personhood isn’t new, but it has historically been unpopular. In a 2013 legal journal article, reproductive-rights expert Maya Manian argued that’s because “public concern over the ‘side effects’ of personhood laws”—such as infringing on fertility care, contraception access, and women’s health care more broadly—“seems to have persuaded even those opposed to abortion to reject personhood legislation.” It was, in other words, a step too far for most people.

In a relatively short span of time, however, the idea has gone from “radical or fringe” to one that is gaining ground, Reingold says. It has even transcended the anti-abortion movement, with ex-spouses in some cases using the concept to argue that frozen embryos should be treated by the courts as children, not marital property, during divorce proceedings. As such ideas snowball, IVF may become the next frontier in the battle over reproductive rights, advocates and scholars say.

Read More: The Silent Shame of Male Infertility

“It’s clear to us—it always has been—that the anti-abortion movement has not, and will not, stop their efforts at limiting or banning abortion,” says Karla Torres, who leads the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights’ work on assisted reproductive technology. They are “squarely targeting reproductive freedom more broadly,” drawing everything from IVF to contraception into the fray.

If IVF becomes harder to access, it’s hard to overstate the effect for American families and culture at large. About 2% of babies born in the U.S. in recent years—nearly 100,000 annually—arrived with the help of IVF. But the technology’s impact transcends statistics. In about a half century of use, it has reshaped what it means to be a parent, who gets to be one, and how—progress that’s now under threat.

A confusing position

In some ways, IVF is an unlikely target. The technology enables people to have badly wanted biological children, a sentiment that could be seen as having a “conservative traditional family aspect to it,” says Amanda Roth, an associate professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at the State University of New York at Geneseo. The importance of having children is a regular conservative talking point—see: Vance recently calling child-free women “cat ladies” without a “direct stake” in the future of America—and IVF makes it possible for more people to do that.

But many in the anti-abortion movement argue that life begins at the moment of conception—that is, the moment sperm fertilizes an egg to create an embryo, either the old-fashioned way or in a laboratory. (A fertilized egg is considered an embryo until the end of the 10th week of pregnancy, when it becomes a fetus.)

To that effect, about a third of U.S. states currently have laws that establish prenatal personhood rights at some stage of pregnancy, usually as a means of curtailing access to abortion by establishing that terminating a pregnancy is tantamount to killing a child. Nine of these laws, such as those in Arkansas, Kansas, and Tennessee, are either sweeping enough or vaguely worded enough that they could put IVF services at risk, according to analysis from the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice provided to TIME. Six additional states, including the Dakotas, Michigan, and Oklahoma, have either feticide or wrongful death laws broad enough to potentially apply to embryos. And there’s always the possibility of new laws: already in 2024, more than a dozen bills focused on prenatal personhood have been introduced across the U.S.

Read More: The Abortion Fight Isn’t a ‘War on Women.’ It’s a War on Poor Women

Greer Donley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies abortion law, doesn’t think curtailing access to IVF is a “priority” for the anti-abortion movement, but rather an “unfortunate side effect that [anti-abortion advocates] haven’t been able to account for.” It’s a narrative problem: to argue an embryo in a mother’s womb is a person, but one sitting in a fertility clinic freezer isn’t, would weaken the movement’s argument. So, despite the cognitive dissonance, IVF has become “collateral damage” in the abortion wars, Donley believes.

Whether the situation was intentional or not, threats to IVF are real. The Alabama Supreme Court demonstrated as much in February, when it ruled that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to not-yet-implanted embryos, prompting fertility clinics to pause IVF services for fear that patients or providers could be legally liable if embryos were destroyed in the course of care. That’s not an irrational fear: embryos are destroyed all the time in the fertility world, either purposely (perhaps because a patient no longer wishes to pay for storage, or because the embryo is unlikely to result in a healthy pregnancy) or because of human error.

Accidents happen, says Dr. Gerard Letterie, a reproductive endocrinologist at Seattle Reproductive Medicine who has written about the potential impact of fetal personhood laws on clinicians. An embryo could be destroyed through an innocent mistake, like someone tripping while carrying a petri dish. “If that were to be made a felony charge, that’s a big deal,” Letterie says.

In that scenario, clinics might stop services entirely to avoid putting providers in legal jeopardy, as happened in Alabama. Or, even if services proceeded, providers might stop practicing in states with punitive laws, Letterie says, making access to fertility care as scattershot as access to abortion care. Already, fertility clinics tend to be clustered in wealthier urban areas.

Read More: Why It’s So Hard to Have Your Fertility Tested

Even short of criminal charges for providers, prenatal personhood laws could affect fertility practices, Letterie says. He can imagine policies that limit the number of eggs that may be fertilized per cycle to avoid creating extra embryos that ultimately end up discarded. Such policies—the likes of which have already been implemented elsewhere in the world, such as in Malta—could reduce the odds of patients getting pregnant, since not all embryos are viable, and force people to go through more rounds of treatment, making IVF more expensive and inaccessible than it already is. IVF can already cost upward of $10,000 per cycle without insurance, and coverage varies by state and insurance provider. If costs go up even more, Letterie says, IVF would be inaccessible to virtually everyone who isn’t mega-wealthy or lucky to have excellent health insurance.

Even taking finances out of the picture, threats to IVF have particularly high stakes for certain people. Those who stand to lose the most are those for whom IVF has been revolutionary over its half century of use: namely same-sex couples, people with medical infertility, and those who have decided to have children without a partner or later in life. “The existence of reproductive technologies has opened up new horizons for family life,” says Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University and author of Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. In a future without reliable access to IVF, the possibilities of what families can look like might shrink.

A crossroads for U.S. culture

IVF and other fertility services helped break open the narrow definition of family that dominated for so long—a married man and woman and their naturally conceived children—to reveal a whole world of options. A mother can be 45 and single, even if she’s survived cancer or had her fallopian tubes removed or needs to use a donor egg to get pregnant. Same-sex couples can use “reciprocal” IVF to incorporate both of their genetic material. A child can even have three biological parents, a controversial technique that is not currently legal in the U.S. but is in several other countries.

“We’ve seen a significant diversification in how people understand kinship, relatedness, and parenting,” says Sarah Franklin, who directs the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. 

This progress has not been equally felt around the world. Compared to the U.S., Europe and Asia have historically employed stricter regulations on the use of reproductive technologies like IVF. Although some of those policies have loosened in recent years, single and older women, trans and non-binary people, and/or same-sex couples are still barred from using reproductive technologies in countries including China, Poland, Turkey, and Italy. And in many poorer countries, including most of the ones in Africa, there is next to no access to IVF at all.

Even in the U.S., where IVF is much more broadly used, reproductive medicine has not wiped out persistent stereotypes and social norms, says Arthur Greil, a professor emeritus at Alfred University in New York and author of Not Yet Pregnant: Infertile Couples in Contemporary America. People are willing to pay IVF’s exorbitant fees, at least in part, because society still emphasizes the importance of a genetic relationship between parent and child, Greil says. And, he says, the knee-jerk assumption is still that a child has both a mother and father. “If you are a single woman with a child, people just assume that you must have been divorced,” Greil says. “It’s become impolite to ask questions like, ‘Where is the baby’s father?’ But people still have the questions.”

Read More: I Was Told I Was Too Fat to Freeze My Eggs

Still, IVF has made what was once impossible—or, at the very least, difficult or done outside the scope of mainstream medicine—possible for many people. Sex, age, and medical diagnoses don’t necessarily close the road to biological parenthood anymore; they are just speed bumps. Reproductive technologies are expensive and imperfect, working only about half the time in the best circumstances and becoming even less of a sure bet among patients who are older or relying on donated embryos. But it has made the possibility of biological parenthood real for swaths of the population that, a century ago, would have had zero or few options. “Fertility medicine has made all of us parents-in-waiting,” says Laura Mamo, a professor of public health at San Francisco State University who studies the intersection of sexuality and medicine.

The trickle-down effects can be seen throughout U.S. culture. Women, no longer so pressured by biological clocks to end their careers just as they’re advancing, now outnumber men in the college-educated workforce, and some employers offer fertility benefits to entice workers to stay longer. People are getting married later, if ever, freed from the need to settle for an imperfect partner to have a family. Queer parenthood is on the rise, and same-sex couples are making fertility equality a new social-justice issue, fighting for fair treatment by insurance providers and clinicians. Scientific advances in fertility medicine, like the ability to pick embryos by sex, are even raising important new bioethical dilemmas.

IVF is not solely responsible for those shifts—Franklin sees it more as a “mirror” reflecting major societal changes and conditions—but it plays a part. Making the technology harder or impossible to access, then, would have profound effects on countless people, particularly those from marginalized groups. And that, Mamo says, may be exactly the point for some people pushing forward the prenatal personhood movement.

“It’s not really about personhood,” Mamo says. “It’s really about this expansion of gender and family and sexuality and autonomy over people’s bodies.”

Fighting back

Already, legislators and reproductive-rights advocates are preparing for battle. In his first speech as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reaffirmed his commitment to protecting reproductive health care including IVF, a technology that he and his wife used to have their daughter, Hope. “When Vice President [Harris] and I talk about freedom, we talk about the freedom to make your own health care decisions,” Walz said.

Elsewhere, the Center for Reproductive Rights has for years been working with partner advocacy groups and legislators to expand access to IVF by implementing new state policies around fertility coverage and broadening those that already exist, which are often written in ways that exclude same-sex couples or people who aren’t cisgender. That work is continuing in earnest, Torres says. And in the aftermath of the Alabama decision, lawmakers in at least a dozen states introduced bills meant to either protect IVF providers from liability or specify that embryos outside the human body do not legally qualify as people, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights nonprofit. A broader package of pro-IVF bills moved forward at the federal level before being blocked by Republican senators in June.

Along with legislative solutions, the reproductive-rights movement is also trying to develop legal defenses that can be used to stop prenatal personhood arguments in court, says Donley, the Pittsburgh law professor. Judges may hold long-term appointments and don’t necessarily need to win elections—which means some can stray from public opinion with fewer consequences than elected officials. “I feel confident right now that the politics of reproductive rights are such that Republican legislatures aren’t going to pass anti-IVF bills,” Donley says. “Republican judges are another story. They get to do whatever they want.”

Read More: ‘I Don’t Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.’ Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

That means people who want to protect IVF access will need compelling legal arguments, says Georgetown’s Reingold. One, she says, could be pointing out the slippery slope of prenatal personhood. If an embryo is considered a person in one legal context, it could be considered one in many: a pregnant person could arguably claim their embryo as a tax dependent, a beneficiary for public assistance, or (in a lower-stakes scenario) another person for the purposes of driving in a carpool lane. Pointing out “consequences for other areas of the law that haven’t necessarily been completely thought through” could be an effective strategy for limiting the influence of fetal personhood arguments, Reingold says.

Another possible consequence: if an embryo is legally considered a person, a pregnant person could feasibly be criminalized for a miscarriage or pregnancy complication, says Kulsoom Ijaz, a senior staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice. Ijaz says she’s “cautiously optimistic” that pointing out such dystopian ripple effects would sway some judges and lawmakers. “It’s a matter of summoning defiant hope so that we…make sure there is no more rollback on people’s most basic civil and human rights,” she says.

There is some precedent to back Ijaz’ optimism. Even in the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the justices did not take a position on “if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” which could foreshadow a broader hesitation for judges throughout the U.S. court system to consider questions of legal personhood.

That reluctance may not last forever. But in the meantime, IVF advocates like Carr, the first U.S. person born using the technology, are leaning on some of the “best tools” they have: their own stories, which underscore how life-changing IVF can be for individuals, couples, and families. “I always knew there were people who didn’t agree with how I was born. Around age 10, I realized I can potentially educate people,” Carr says. “I feel very strongly, and I always have, that people fear things they don’t understand.”

The stakes of that education campaign are high. Carr’s birth was a historic first for the U.S. “I do not want to think about who could potentially be the last,” she says.