(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Alabama IVF ruling: Hypocrite Republicans likely to bend rules on foetal personhood [1] [] Date: 2024-02 Republicans in the US were this month delivered an inadvertent setback in their continued insistence that embryos and foetuses are ‘people’ with ‘rights’ that mean abortion should be illegal. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed with the party’s evangelical and Catholic Christians that the collection of cells that make up human embryos are ‘babies’ – ruling that several couples who were undergoing IVF (in vitro fertilisation) and who lost frozen embryos due to alleged negligence could sue under the state’s wrongful death law. Because the ruling went well beyond the specific issue in question to declare embryos people in no uncertain terms, it led several of the state’s hospitals and clinics to suddenly and disruptively cease providing fertility treatments to avoid legal trouble. This caused the US news cycle to last week be dominated by discussions of ‘foetal personhood’ – the idea that a foetus should have the same legal rights as a child – which have left the Republican Party divided and confused. Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now Though they mostly refrain from condemning the procedure outright, many of GOP’s elite evangelicals believe IVF is acceptable only for married couples and only if no embryos are destroyed. This makes the premise untenable, as although an individual doctor may occasionally agree to the extremely non-standard practice of implanting every embryo created in the process, this can be dangerous to the mother and falls afoul of well established medical best practices. Establishment Republicans, meanwhile, seem shocked and concerned at the consequences of the politics they have pursued for decades. Texas’s Catholic governor, Greg Abbott has scrambled to express support for IVF, while Donald Trump has called for the Alabama state legislature to find a workaround to protect it. Make no mistake: things are only going to get weirder and more dangerous from here. As someone who grew up evangelical in America’s Bible Belt in the 1980s and 1990s, it was drilled into my head that ‘life begins at conception’ and that abortion ‘kills babies’ from as far back as I can remember. Over the decades, I’ve watched mostly white, right-wing Christians push state-level foetal personhood bills and constitutional amendments across the country – most of which always seemed doomed to fail. But as I noted in a previous column, “the point of introducing outrageous legislation isn’t always to pass it”. Sometimes, I explained, it is “to throw fuel on the fire of moral panic and/or to push the envelope on some political matter.” And sometimes, I’ll add now, continually hammering away at an extremist policy that initially seems politically impossible makes the thing less and less impossible until it becomes, well, possible. So while those Christian politicians’ early efforts to push foetal personhood might have seemed Quixotic to those who even bothered to take notice of them, in recent years, some have begun to pass. It was the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in June 2022, which overturned the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade precedent that legalised abortion, that opened the floodgates to horrors like the recent ruling from Alabama’s state supreme court. Indeed, the Alabama ruling not only cited Dobbs but also came with a concurrence by the state’s chief justice, Tom Parker, that is worth quoting at some length here for its unapologetic theocratic language: [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/ivf-alabama-foetal-personhood-rights-embryos-republicans-hypocrisy/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/