The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The Truth About Alabama's Ruling on IVF
Fertilized eggs are human life, ruled Alabama’s Supreme Court last month. Yet the harmful lies about that ruling have been prevalent. Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, explains the core of the issue for First Things.
During the George W. Bush administration, Americans were repeatedly warned about Christian fascists or theocrats threatening to take over America. Now we’re told Christian Nationalists will be running the second Trump administration and imperiling all we hold dear as Americans.
Ruth Marcus opened a recent Washington Post column with a “welcome to the theocracy.” She was referring to an opinion by Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker on a state constitutional amendment regarding “the sanctity of unborn life” as applied to IVF embryos. Justice Parker had cited various sources in the Jewish and Christian traditions to explain the roots of “sanctity.” …
Theocracy is rule by religious authorities. Alabama doesn’t have that. But the idea that rights come from God, not government, is the basic American creed, etched into our founding document by no less secular a figure than Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Anderson argues, “The institutional separation of church and state does not entail a separation of politics and religion, or law and morality.” In fact, he says, “All law is based on morality, and all moral systems, secular or religious, rest on ideas about the ultimate source of meaning and value.”
Back to Alabama, he writes:
The media didn’t just overreact to a judge’s mentioning God as the source of the sanctity of life. They falsely claimed IVF was about to be banned—and Republicans fell for the claim. In reality, the Alabama civil (not criminal) case was brought by the parents of IVF children, not opponents of IVF. The clinic keeping their embryonic children in cryopreservation had not provided adequate protection, so a patient managed to wander in and remove several embryos, causing their deaths. The parents sued to hold the clinic accountable for the wrongful death of their children. And the Alabama Supreme Court held that a statute protecting minors (including, as precedent held, embryos in the womb) contained no exception for embryos outside the womb. Far from attempting to ban IVF, the parents who brought this lawsuit were trying to protect frozen embryonic children, and rightly so.
The media’s manipulations would be risible if IVF weren’t so morally and emotionally fraught. Many couples experiencing infertility ache to start a family. Doctors don’t always impress on them the human costs of IVF. For one birth, doctors might create ten to twenty embryos, transfer several of the “most promising,” freeze the rest, and if more than one implants, abort the others. So the typical IVF cycle results in multiple dead and frozen embryos. And unlike in European nations, there are almost no laws in America regulating how many embryos can be created or destroyed, or how frozen embryonic human beings can be treated.
Anderson discusses the difference between natural procreation and scientific advancement through IVF, including the moral dilemmas the latter creates. He concludes:
The arguments stand or fall on the merits, not the religious identity (or lack thereof) of those making them. But Republicans should not fall for the left’s trap here. They should not hesitate to say that America’s best social and political reforms were suffused with religious conviction. Or that the deepest reasons for our laws lie in God’s eternal law. Nor should Republicans follow pollsters selling them on new government entitlements to IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies. There is no political appetite for bans on these procedures, and the GOP should call out the media’s lies suggesting there is. But our current state of unregulated embryo fabricating, freezing, and destroying does need fixing. The medically superior alternatives to IVF warrant promotion. And at the very least, embryos created through IVF deserve legal protection.
The Alabama ruling was legally and morally correct. And if Republicans would speak up, more Americans could learn the truth about it.