The Battle For Female Bodily Autonomy: The Right's War on Women

This what I was talking about in the other thread, @Melkerson
https://x.com/aldotcom/status/1760346996940877940?s=46&t=k3YA52U8SV6oodQANcy20g

4 Likes

Friday’s ruling involves an Alabama law called the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, though its implications stretch far beyond this one statute. The act allows the parent of a deceased child to collect punitive damages against a party who causes “the death of a minor child” through negligence. Here, the plaintiffs—who already conceived several children through IVF—accused a fertility center of violating the act by failing to secure their unused embryos. They alleged that a patient accessed the embryos without authorization, dropping and “killing” them. The plaintiffs claimed that the fertility center is liable under the act because their embryos qualified as “children.”

By a 7–2 vote, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed. The majority declared that the “natural, ordinary, commonly understood meaning” of the word child includes embryos (which the opinion dubbed “extrauterine children”). Incredibly, the majority said this was true when the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act was passed in 1872. That’s because, according to the majority, state lawmakers of the 1870s believed that the “unborn” qualified as full legal “persons” no matter their “physical location”—that is, inside a “biological uterus” or a “cryogenic nursery.”

This holding on its own has terrifying implications for IVF in Alabama. It means that a medical professional who inadvertently damages or destroys a microscopic embryo has maimed or killed a legal person and is on the hook for punitive damages that could run into the millions. Clinics simply cannot bear this crushing liability. Any accidental damage to an embryo, and even a failed thawing or transfer, could trigger a calamitous wrongful death suit. And what about unused embryos? The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision suggests that if patients refuse to pay for their storage, the clinic must simply preserve them for free, forever, lest it get slapped with a suit. Yet another unthinkable cost that no clinic could bear.

But the court’s reasoning went far beyond this one statute. The majority also cited a provision of the Alabama Constitution referred to as the Sanctity of Life Amendment, which “acknowledges, declares, and affirms that it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate.” According to the majority, this amendment requires courts to interpret “the rights of the unborn child equally with the rights of born children.” In practice, that appears to mean that every state law involving “children” must be extended to embryos—including criminal laws, up to and including homicide. Does the destruction of an embryo, intentional or not, now constitute first-degree murder in Alabama? The majority ominously reserved this question for a future case.

In a concurrence, however, Chief Justice Tom Parker spelled out the implications. The people of Alabama, he declared, have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” (If the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t demolished the establishment clause, this opinion would surely violate it.) As a result, Parker continued, the courts have an affirmative duty to protect “the unborn,” including embryos. Any law that “risks the deaths of these little people” is constitutionally suspect. Courts may not engage in the business of “carving out an exception for the people in this case, small as they were.” This reasoning, on its own terms, applies to criminal laws with the exact same force as civil laws. And it means, Parker added, that even if the Alabama Legislature wanted to legalize IVF as it’s currently practiced, the state constitution would prohibit it from doing so.

Not to worry, Parker assured Alabamians: IVF can still go on. But courts, not legislators or medical professionals, must dictate how it is performed so they can ensure that it avoids “incurring the wrath of a holy God.” Parker, who has no medical degree, then laid out an alternative method of IVF that would, he alleged, comply with the Alabama Constitution (and God’s will, as interpreted by the chief justice).

Before diving into the gratuitous, anti-scientific cruelty of Parker’s method, it’s important to understand how IVF is actually practiced. Doctors retrieve eggs, then fertilize them with sperm. They create as many embryos as possible, then freeze them. The embryos are rated for quality. Higher-quality embryos are thawed and transferred into the uterus. Multiple embryos are often transferred during each cycle in the hopes that at least one will result in a live birth.

This is the standard of care for IVF, and has been for decades. Barbara Collura, president of the National Infertility Association (known as RESOLVE), told me that the mainstream medical establishment universally agrees that this method is in “the best interest of the patient.” It has the highest likelihood of success and requires the least amount of pain.

But according to Parker, this method is unconstitutional, because it does not sufficiently protect embryos from being “killed.” (Although the majority is subtler, that’s the clear implication of its opinion too.) So Parker laid out his alternative: Doctors must create just one embryo at a time. Each embryo, no matter how poor its quality, must be transferred. Only one embryo may be transferred at a time. If the cycle fails, the whole process must start all over again.

Parker noted that Italy enshrined a similarly restrictive approach into law in 2004. Curiously, though, he failed to note that the country overturned the law five years later because it was a miserable medical failure. It has never been widely practiced in the United States for the same reason. Collura told me that Parker’s approach would radically reduce the quality of Alabama patients’ treatment while increasing the cost exponentially. Why? IVF patients would have to accept the transfer of a single low-quality embryo that is certain to fail—and to do so one embryo at a time. Each transfer requires months’ worth of expensive medication, including injectable, both before and after the procedure. And each failed cycle requires the patient to start all over again. Most states (including Alabama) do not require insurance to cover IVF, and each cycle can cost up to $30,000. So Parker’s method would force patients—the ones who can afford it—to undergo doomed, single-embryo transfers, one by one. All out of respect for a clump of cells that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

This connection should be no surprise. The anti-abortion movement has long opposed IVF, seeing no moral distinction between the destruction of an embryo, a fetus, or a living child. Most Americans disagree with this view: IVF was entirely legal in every state until the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision. With that ruling, the dog has caught the car, and we have entered a new era of the post-Roe assault on reproductive rights, with judges openly limiting patients’ ability to undergo fertility treatment. As Collura told me, a decision like this was “inevitable” after Roe ’s reversal, “given how the anti-choice movement views embryos. The attack of IVF was just on the back burner.” On Friday, to the detriment of untold thousands, it abruptly moved to the front.

4 Likes

My god

https://x.com/mmfa/status/1760354985630482926?s=46

What is this “wrongful death” namby-pamby bullshit. According to these people, embryos are children. Destroying them is therefore obviously murder. Come on, Alabama, step the fuck up to the plate.

And when you come to think of it, choosing NOT to create life is pretty similar to destroying life. Both are fucking with God’s plan, if I’m not mistaken. Goodbye, birth control. Also now illegal: the rhythm method and pulling out.

OK now that I really think about it, any woman who doesn’t actively try to get pregnant is refusing to accept the purpose for which God has created her.

2 Likes

1 Like

Yes, I know.

It’s not surprising that they would pause until get some legal opinions. If they stopped and most of their patients didn’t just get IVF elsewhere, then I would be surprised.

Again, obviously this is a terrible ruling.

I’m also curious what the other private IVF clinics in the state are doing. Are they pausing also? Anyone know?

Wapo says at least two have paused. Seems like there was a conference call between some of the big players in the state to discuss how to move forward.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/02/21/alabama-ivf-clinics-doctors-embryo-ruling/

By Wednesday, the fallout was clear: At least two of the state’s eight IVF clinics, the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s IVF division and Alabama Fertility, said they were pausing some parts of IVF treatment. They canceled appointments with patients as they navigated a court decision that has sent shock waves through the world of reproductive medicine.

2 Likes

Thanks. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

It does seem that some are pressing on, for now.

The facts of the case that led this whole thing are fucking nuts. Maybe it’s common knowledge, but apparently there was a couple who had some stored embryos and somehow a random patient got into the embryo storage area, took their embryos and dropped them on the floor, thus destroying them.

Apparently the couple was likely never going to use those embryos since they had successful IVF births. I can see them being mad, but it’s fucking crazy that their being big mad, resulted in a law that will make IVF (the very treatment that they benefited from) more expensive and inconvenient for everyone in the state. To achieve ultimate irony, we need that couple to want one more kid.

1 Like

https://twitter.com/JoshuaSchriver/status/1758848896757842420

Raise your hand if you’re surprised that birth control is next on the chopping block? I know somewhere I saw a list of what comes after Roe was overturned and IVF was near the top. Birth control was right near it

If banning birth control will sway the election, I want Republicans to disastrously overreach on this issue.

“Overreach” only applies to Dems, duh. When Republicans ban something, it’s so that Real Americans can have more Freedom. You can’t overreach on Freedom, that’s just common sense.

Maybe they’re just taking longer to digest the judgement. A third one has also now paused:

https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1760732170207805539

https://twitter.com/AudreyFahlberg/status/1761060968468029802?t=Dom0g3vp2sNtwsv8QgFaqA&s=19

Dog caught the car and the public don’t like it

1 Like

image

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/111982408054675705

“Donald Trump Splits with Mike Johnson, Alabama, and all Christian Conservatives” is the headline we will never see anywhere.

1 Like

Imagine having Logan Roy as your dad and him sending messages about the ultimate joy of having children. Lol

4 Likes